The acquisition of Turkish by a bilingual child: A case study

In this study, a sequential bilingual child?s language development was observed in the second language (Turkish) which she started acquiring at a point after the ?first? language (English) had already started to be established. In this study, we investigated the acquisition of subject pronouns, questions, negation and case markers in Turkish.The participant of the study was born in England and stayed there for three years and spent summer holidays in Turkey for two months in the first and second years. In the third year, the family moved to Turkey. 3 months after their arrival, the spontaneous speech data between the participant and the researcher was collected for 7 months in Turkish.Our aim of this study was to shed light on the issue of bilingualism (English-Turkish) in the frame of the morphosyntactic development of two typologically different languages. The investigation of distribution of morphosyntactic forms to evaluate the extent to which domains at the interface between syntax and pragmatics were vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence in bilingual acquisition and the developmental path of the acquisition of some structures were inquired.As a conclusion of this study, we asserted that the bilingual children mainly followed the developmental paths of monolingual children; however, cross-linguistic structures were found in the use of subjects and negated elements. Turkish is a pro-drop language while English is non-pro-drop language. In Turkish, there are three ways for negating constructions one of which is by adding a negative marker between the stem and the other markers like tense and person. As this requires more analysis of the structure compared to the other lexical elements, the bilingual child uses the English structure at the beginning of her acquisition with a universal vocalized negation element which is observed only for a month; after that, she uses the target-like structures in her production. In questions and case markers, the bilingual child gradually developed the cognitive patterns required for competence in linguistic domains.Keywords: The Competition Model, Cross-Linguistic Influence, Sequential Bilingualism, Morphosyntax, Developmental Path.