Türkçe ve Türk işaret dili (TİD)'nde hikaye başlangıçları ve karakter tanıtımları: Dil kanalının farklı olması bize neyi gösterir?

The aim of the current thesis is to track the developmental patterns in learning to set the scene and introduce referents in narrations produced by hearing children acquiring Turkish and deaf children acquiring Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili - TİD). While narrating events presented in visual modality as in picture stories, spoken language acquiring children need to translate them into sequential segments of verbal output following the linguistic structures of their language (Berman and Slobin, 1994). This is not the case for deaf children who acquire a sign language where space is used to describe events and linguistic structures bear visual resemblance to the real events. The data were collected from three age groups in TİD and Turkish: Younger children between 3;5-6;8 years, older children between 7;2-9;11, and adults. There were 10 participants in each age group in each language, thus a total of 60 people took part in the current study. The participants were asked to narrate a picture story (Balloon Story, Karmiloff-Smith, 1981) to a deaf or a hearing person depending on the language condition. All the data were annotated and coded by deaf and hearing research assistants for the linguistic elements used to set the scene at the beginning of the narration (i.e., who, where, what information for the first picture) and the use of explicit linguistic forms to introduce the referents (i.e., the boy, the balloon man, the balloon). The results of the analyses showed that TİD-signing and Turkish-speaking children reached the adult patterns in learning to use scene setting elements at similar ages: In both languages, older age children, but not younger age children, were similar to adults in how frequently they used different types of scene setting elements. As to referent introduction, even younger children in both languages were adult-like in making explicit referrals to different referents of Balloon Story. Turkish speakers, in general, used explicit referrals to the main and secondary animate and inanimate characters of the story more frequently than TİD signers, which could be an effect of modality or typological difference between two languages.