The acquisition of prosodic focus and clefts in Turkish

This thesis explored Turkish-speaking children's comprehension of prosodic focus and clefts. Experiment 1 examined preschoolers' comprehension of prosodic focus concerning subject and object-focused sentences. Results indicate that children perform significantly better in object-focused sentences than subject-focused ones until age five. Thus, Turkish-speaking children comprehend the prosodic focus gradually and perceive the object focus as default in the early years of development. Experiment 2 considered the effects of pragmatic felicity, age, and cleft type on cleft comprehension. The findings demonstrate that Turkish-speaking children achieved a high level of competence in interpreting both types of clefts regardless of the factors. Experiment 3 aimed to understand whether the methodology used in Experiment 2 impacted children's performances and explored their comprehension with a more complex experimental paradigm. Results of Experiment 3 provided more evidence that Turkish-speaking children can comprehend both cleft types at a similar accuracy level. In conclusion, this research suggests that Turkish-speaking children exhibit differences in comprehension of prosodic focus and cleft structures. The acquisition of prosodic focus predisposes an object advantage. There is no asymmetry in the cleft acquisition process. Our experiments demonstrate that Turkish's unique syntactic characteristics significantly affect children's language acquisition process, and they allow children to employ different strategies to comprehend subject- and object-clefts. Consequently, this thesis is notable for being the first attempt to examine Turkish prosodic focus and cleft sentence structures, and it serves as a comprehensive foundation for future research.