Clause Chaining and Discourse Continuity in Turkish Children's Narratives.

The present study examines the development of complex sentences with non-finite clause combining with particular focus on clause chaining, in narratives of 40 Turkish-speaking 4- to 11-year-olds and six adults elicited by a wordless picture book. Results show a gradual increase by age in the variety of clauses combined, the length of the complex sentences and their frequency of use. Clause chains formed with converbal clauses are the earliest and most frequent type of clause combinations, already present in 4-year-olds' complex sentences with 1-non-finite clause. Older children's and adults' 2- or 3-non-finite clause complex sentences consist of some combinations of adverbial, complement, relative and converbal clauses. Developmentally, clause chains establish first, aspectual-temporal continuity, then temporal-causal continuity. Sentence-internal and cross-sentence-boundary referential continuities are present early, from age 4 onwards. These findings are discussed in terms of the demands of narrative organization as well as the syntactic and semantic complexity of the clause combination devices in Turkish.

Functions of Turkish evidentials in early child-caregiver interactions: a growth curve analysis of longitudinal data.

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker -mIs in naturalistic child-caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36 months of age. We charted individual differences in child and caregiver speech over time by conducting growth curve analyses. Children followed a similar course of acquisition in terms of the proportion of the marker in overall speech. However, children exhibited differences with respect to the order of emergence of different evidential functions (e.g., inference, hearsay), where each child showed a unique pattern irrespective of the frequency in caregiver input. Nonfactual use of the marker was very frequent in child and caregiver speech, where high-SES caregivers mostly produced the marker during story-telling and pretend play, and low-SES caregivers for regulating the child's behavior.

Evidentials and source knowledge in Turkish.

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the appropriate use of grammaticalized markers of direct experience, inference, and linguistic report by age three, (2) the understanding of knowledge source ("theory of knowledge") around age four, (3) the understanding of linguistic form and knowledge source relationship ("theory of evidentiality") by age six, and (4) a predictive relationship between the use of the reported speech marker and memory for knowledge source around age four.