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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. 119–150

Acquisition of scope relations by Turkish-English bilingual children

| Boğaziçi University, Turkey
| Macquarie University, Australia
| Macquarie University, Australia
This is a bidirectional case study in the acquisition of semantics by Turkish – English bilingual children. The research question is whether bilingual children acquiring Turkish and English use parental input versus a principle of language learnability, as the basis for their initial interpretation of sentences with a temporal connective (English before, Turkish önce) and disjunction (Turkish ya da, English or). According to the learnability principle, bilingual children were expected to initially assign the same interpretation to the target sentences in both languages, despite differences in the input from adult speakers. The findings of the study confirmed this prediction, and are taken as evidence in support of the principle of language learnability, called the Semantic Subset Principle.
Keywords: bilingualism, Turkish, temporal connectives, disjunction, language learnability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The disjunction parameter
    • 2.1Disjunction in logic and in language
    • 2.2The implicature of exclusivity
    • 2.3Downward entailment
    • 2.4Scope ambiguities
    • 2.5The disjunction parameter
  • 3.Temporal operators
  • 4.The interpretation of logical expressions in child language
    • 4.1Monolingual child language
    • 4.2Bilingual child language
  • 5.Experiment
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Procedures
    • 5.3Materials
    • 5.4Research questions and predictions
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Pre-test with temporal operators: Before/önce
    • 6.2Pre-test with disjunction words: Or/ya da
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.General discussion
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.06gec
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