This study analyses variation sets in a sample of child-directed speech (CDS) in Turkish in terms of their structure and effect on child speech. The term "variation set" was first introduced to describe the sequences of repetitions, in which the intention behind expressions stays the same throughout the whole conversation while the form…

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,…

This study investigated how Turkish-speaking children and adults interpret negative sentences with disjunction (English "or") and ones with conjunction (English "and"). The goal was to see whether Turkish-speaking children and adults assigned the same interpretation to both kinds of sentences and, if not, to determine the…

This study is a systematic analysis of the information content of a wide range of distributional cues to word boundaries, individually and in combination, in naturally occurring child-directed speech across three languages (English, Polish, and Turkish). The paper presents a series of statistical analyses examining the relative predictive strength…

Study of the German attrition of two Turkish girls who returned to Turkey after residing in Germany found that attrition stages (slower speech and code-switching; lexical attrition; and basic grammar) were largely a mirror-image of a Turkish boy's acquisition of German while residing in Germany. (14 references) (Author/CB)

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being…

To study lexical knowledge relevant for school success, 40 monolingual Dutch and 40 bilingual Turkish 9 and 11-year olds were asked to explain the meanings of common Dutch nouns in an extended word definition task. Compared to the monolingual Dutch children, the bilingual Turkish children allotted less extensive and varied meanings to Dutch words.…