Children need to learn the demands of their native language in the early vocabulary development phase. In this dynamic process, parental multimodal input may shape neurodevelopmental trajectories while also being tailored by child-related factors. Moving beyond typically characterized group profiles, in this article, we synthesize growing evidence…

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task,…

Despite increasing number of studies on incidental vocabulary learning through viewing in a foreign language, glosses, which have been proven to have facilitative effects in incidental vocabulary learning via other modes of input, have remained underexplored in audiovisual input. The current study investigates the effects of (1) traditional gloss…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

Studies in language education have mainly been carried out either on target language as a second or a foreign language. However, there are not enough studies on second language and foreign language education in the same setting. This comparative case study investigated the attitudes of two language learner groups toward listening based on their…

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child-caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78…

While numerous training models aim to empower teachers by positioning them as active participants with agency and freedom, they often fall short in providing opportunities for training that seamlessly incorporates both the participants' own language and English. In this study, we used loop input (process and content aligned) in two languages that…

Collocations make it possible to use and understand the language in an effective way. In this context, understanding collocation issues is important for both native speakers and language learners. This study aims at revealing certain determinations and problems with regard to the classification of word combinations in Turkish. For this purpose,…

In a masked morphological priming experiment, we compared the processing of derived and inflected morphologically complex Turkish words in heritage speakers of Turkish living in Berlin and in native speakers of Turkish raised and living in Turkey. The results show significant derivational and inflectional priming effects of a similar magnitude in…

This paper examines the way children younger than two use non-verbal devices (i.e., deictic gestures and communicative functional acts) and pay attention to discourse status (i.e., prior mention vs. newness) of referents in interactions with caregivers. Data based on semi-naturalistic interactions with caregivers of four children, at ages 1;00,…

Research Findings: Are family literacy activities linked to gains in preschool-aged dual language learners' (DLLs') societal language vocabulary? To understand connections between literacy activities and vocabulary, we separately considered literacy activities in the respective heritage language and in the societal language, German, and accounted…