{"title":"Relative clauses in child heritage speakers of Turkish in the United States","authors":"Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, S. Montrul","doi":"10.1075/lab.21027.cos","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n How does complex syntax develop in heritage language children? This study investigates child Turkish heritage\n speakers’ comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Turkish and in English. RCs vary on their syntactic functions\n (subject, object) and show asymmetric patterns of acquisition and processing, which have been explained by linear distance,\n structural distance and input factors. Thirty-two child Turkish HS (ages 6–15) and 48 monolingual Turkish children (ages 3–15)\n completed a picture-sentence matching (comprehension) task and a sentence repetition (production) task in Turkish. The Turkish HS\n were tested on the RC comprehension and production tasks in English as well. The results indicated that the child HS showed (i) better\n performance in English than in Turkish with increasing age, (ii) better comprehension than production of Turkish RCs, (iii)\n replacement of complex RCs with simple juxtaposition in Turkish, and (iv) a subject advantage in comprehension. We take these findings\n to suggest that Turkish RCs do not fully develop in child HS of Turkish in the U.S., although the strength of this explanation\n must be corroborated by a study of child and adult HS. Overall, the findings are most compatible with the structural distance\n account and other factors that may affect production.","PeriodicalId":48664,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Approaches To Bilingualism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Linguistic Approaches To Bilingualism","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21027.cos","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
How does complex syntax develop in heritage language children? This study investigates child Turkish heritage
speakers’ comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Turkish and in English. RCs vary on their syntactic functions
(subject, object) and show asymmetric patterns of acquisition and processing, which have been explained by linear distance,
structural distance and input factors. Thirty-two child Turkish HS (ages 6–15) and 48 monolingual Turkish children (ages 3–15)
completed a picture-sentence matching (comprehension) task and a sentence repetition (production) task in Turkish. The Turkish HS
were tested on the RC comprehension and production tasks in English as well. The results indicated that the child HS showed (i) better
performance in English than in Turkish with increasing age, (ii) better comprehension than production of Turkish RCs, (iii)
replacement of complex RCs with simple juxtaposition in Turkish, and (iv) a subject advantage in comprehension. We take these findings
to suggest that Turkish RCs do not fully develop in child HS of Turkish in the U.S., although the strength of this explanation
must be corroborated by a study of child and adult HS. Overall, the findings are most compatible with the structural distance
account and other factors that may affect production.
期刊介绍:
LAB provides an outlet for cutting-edge, contemporary studies on bilingualism. LAB assumes a broad definition of bilingualism, including: adult L2 acquisition, simultaneous child bilingualism, child L2 acquisition, adult heritage speaker competence, L1 attrition in L2/Ln environments, and adult L3/Ln acquisition. LAB solicits high quality articles of original research assuming any cognitive science approach to understanding the mental representation of bilingual language competence and performance, including cognitive linguistics, emergentism/connectionism, generative theories, psycholinguistic and processing accounts, and covering typical and atypical populations.