Acquisition of word formation in Turkish: Compounding and derivation with agentive suffix

The current study was carried out in order to find out the word formation devices that Turkish speaking children and adults prefer in constructing novel agent nouns in Turkish, and to describe the developmental path that children follow taking the syntactic features of verbs into consideration. 84 children aged between 2;6 and 5;11 with 6 months intervals (12 in each group) were grouped according to gender and presence of siblings. 12 adult university students (age range 20-22) also participated in the study so as to collect data about the options in the language and set a native speaker norm and compare them with children's responses. A structured elicitation task with picture cards was designed for production and comprehension. The verbs in the tasks were selected from Turkish CDI (TIGE) which were categorized according to their syntactic features as transitive and intransitive which was also subcategorized as unergative and unaccusative according to the study by Nakipoğlu (1998). Results showed that in comprehension, all children including the youngest age group could identify the base verbs in increasing percentages by age. In production, Turkish speaking children preferred to use derivations from age 3;0 on, and compounding from age 3;6 on, performing an adult-like pattern from 4;6 on. Results also showed that the syntactic class of input verbs did not have a major effect on children's production. The findings also provided information about the effect of gender and presence of siblings at younger ages. Overall, results were interpreted considering the principles of acquisition proposed by Clark and her colleagues (1981, 1982, 1991, 1993; Clark & Hecht, 1982; Clark & Berman, 1984; Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986).