A developmental study of turkish connectives Türkçe bağlaçlar üzerine gelişimsel bir çalışma

Abstract

© 2018 Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, İstanbul.Connectives present an interesting phenomenon; while even 3-year-olds can produce them accurately, the real mastery of understanding their meaning takes much time in language acquisition. Despite its allure, studies focusing on connective acquisition are limited in number, especially in Turkish. In order to investigate the developmental path of different Turkish connectives, we tested the comprehension of temporal, causal, and adversative connectives in 184 Turkish-speaking primary-school children and 20 Turkish-speaking adults. Our results demonstrated that high-achieving 5-graders show an adult-like performance. Regarding the type of the connective, temporal connectives posed greater challenge for children compared to causal and adversative connectives. The questions were more challenging for all groups (but especially for 3rd graders and low-achieving 5th graders) when they require a backward temporal connective (before that) as the correct answer or include object-referred clauses. We explain these results in light of the multi-dimensional account of connective acquisition.