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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. 361–388

L2 children do not fluctuate

Production and on-line processing of indefinite articles in Turkish-speaking child learners of English

| University of Edinburgh
| University of Reading, United Kingdom

In this study, we examined whether Turkish-speaking child L2 learners of English omitted or substituted indefinite articles in a production task that comprised a referential specific and a non-referential predicational semantic context. We also examined the source of children’s errors using a self-paced listening task where children heard grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with indefinite articles present or omitted. L2 children’s performance was compared with that of an age-matched English-speaking L1 group and a younger L1 group. Results showed that all groups distinguished between the two semantic contexts in both tasks. Although children primarily omitted articles, in the on-line processing task, all groups detected the ungrammaticality related to article omission. We interpret these results within the Missing Surface Inflection and Feature Reassembly hypotheses.

Keywords: Childhood bilingualism, sequential bilingual children, (in)definiteness, specificity, articles, Fluctuation Hypothesis, English, Turkish, Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, Missing Surface inflection Hypothesis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Indefinite articles in English and Turkish
  • 3.L1 acquisition of English indefinite articles
  • 4.Child L2 acquisition of English articles
  • 5.Present study
  • 6.Method
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Materials
      • 6.2.1Production task
      • 6.2.2Self-paced listening task
    • 6.3Procedure
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Production task
      • 7.1.1Descriptive statistics
      • 7.1.2On-line processing task
  • 8.Discussion
    • 8.1Fluctuation or transfer?
    • 8.2Production-processing (a)symmetries
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.16cho
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