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The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 99–118

What does online parsing in Turkish-speaking children reveal about grammar?

 | Harvard University, USA
This paper summarizes recent studies with Turkish-speaking children that explore whether children’s online parsing shares adult processing features. We review findings from a self-paced listening study on the processing of relative clauses that reveals incremental integration of case-marking cues and an eye-tracking study that reveals predictive interpretation of case-marking cues independent of the verb and the word order. We discuss the idea that prediction is a natural by-product of incremental interpretation once we assume that our competence grammar is a lexicalized one that allows one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules. We then show how Combinatory Categorial Grammar could secure a parsing mechanism combining incrementality and predictivity, without sacrificing a bottom-up algorithm, thanks to its monotonic and monostratal nature that allows flexible constituency.
Keywords: online-parsing, eye-tracking, relative clauses, case, Combinatory Categorical Grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Is child parsing incremental and predictive?
  • 3.Online findings from children’s interpretation in head-final languages
  • 4.What do these findings imply about the grammar?
    • 4.1Why CCG as a competence grammar?
    • 4.2Interpretation of the findings in Özge et al. (2015) and Özge et al. (2013)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.05ozg
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