Anadili Türkçe olan 17-39 aylık çocuklarda söz dizimi ve nesne belirten ekin cümle algısı üzerindeki etkisi

The present research includes two experiments examining Turkish-speaking children?s reliance on word order and case marking in the comprehension of simple transitive sentences describing reversible causative actions, using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPL). The data come from a sample of 219 native Turkish-speaking children aged 17- to 39-months, organized into three age groups. The IPL is an experimental procedure which measures sentence comprehension by examining the visual preference of the videotaped scene described by a linguistic stimulus. In the first experiment, children are exposed to simple transitive sentences in the conventional word order in Turkish (SOV), in which the object was not marked with an accusative case marker (e.g. at kuş it-iyor `the horse the bird push-PROG?). In the second experiment, the object featured an accusative case marker (e.g. at kuş-u it-iyor `the horse the bird- ACC push-PROG?). Results indicated that children aged 24- to 39 months relied on word order to determine who-is-doing-what-to-whom in the described action. This result suggests that the canonical word order is an important cue in sentence comprehension in Turkish, which allows for different pragmatically-driven word orders as opposed to a fixed word order language such as English. Contrary to expectations, the presence of the accusative case marker did not facilitate comprehension to a better degree. Children reacted late to the presence of the accusative case marker in the auditory stimulus, displaying matching behavior towards the end of a given video. In addition, the presence of the accusative case marker was most influential in the older age group (39-month-olds). Results are discussed in terms of the additional processing that the accusative case marking could demand for younger children.Keywords: language development, Turkish-speaking children, sentence comprehension, word order, accusative case marking