Konuşmadaki üç pragmatik faktörün (ortak dikkat, nesnenin fiziksel varlığı, önceki konuşmalarda bahis) Türkçe öğrenen çocukların ve bu çocukların düzenli bakıcılarının referans verme becerileri (dilbilgisel referans formları ve mimikler/jestler) üzerindeki etkisi

The goal of the present study is to investigate the relative contribution of three discourse-pragmatic principles (joint attention, physical presence, and prior mention) to young Turkish toddlers' and their regular caregivers' referential communicative devices, i.e., verbal referential forms and referential gestures. We examine four Turkish children's (2 males, 2 females) daily interactions with their regular caregivers at three different time points, when the children were at 12, 17, and 21 months of age. The results indicated that the children and their regular caregivers basically used their referential forms based on the similar discourse-pragmatic principles. First, the children's and their caregivers' referential forms changed depending on the physical status of a referent. Both the children and the caregivers were less likely to use overt linguistic forms as opposed to ellipsis of noun phrases for physically present referents. Second, both groups were more likely to express physically present referents that are mentioned in the immediately preceding discourse through overt arguments. The children and their regular caregivers' use of discourse-pragmatic principles in choosing their referential forms differed from each in some respects. First, unlike the children, the caregivers were less likely to use overt arguments for previously mentioned referents. Second, as opposed to the children, the caregivers were more likely to use overt arguments for physically present referents that were mentioned within the last five utterances in prior discourse.The analyses of the referential gesture use revealed that the caregivers', but not the children?s, use of gestures varied depending on the physical status of a referent. The caregivers were more likely to employ gestures for physically present referents than for physically absent referents. However, they decreased their rate of use of gestures when physically present referents were previously mentioned in prior talk. The children's and the caregivers' referential choices did not change depending on whether they jointly attended to a referent or not.This study explored how referential communication about external entities unfold verbally and gesturally in caregiver-child discourse with children younger than two and learning Turkish, where nouns as subjects and objects are grammatically allowed to be left out from overt verbal expressions. Although the children and their caregivers largely benefit from similar discourse-pragmatic principles, discrepancies appear owing to the asymmetry between children as new learners of language and caregivers as main organizers of discourse.