Analaysis of the morphological and syntactic characteristics of bilingual Turkish-Kurdish speaking and monolingual Turkish speaking children with specific language impairment

Some of the children may have problems with understanding or expressing language and grammar due to several reasons. Generally, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is described as significant problems in the development of spoken language because of unknown etiology. Children with SLI (Specific Language Disorder) demonstrate several deficits in the receptive and expressive domains of language with different severities. Many cross-linguistic studies argue that children with SLI have specific problems with morphology and syntax. Studies in typologically different languages have also been arising to investigate the specifics on a variety of grammatical aspects and it is shown that there are many cross-linguistic differences. However, few researches have focused on the linguistic characteristics in Turkish children with SLI which is native language of over 100 million people worldwide. On the other hand for Kurdish there is almost no research focusing both on the normal and abnormal language development. The findings of limited studies done for Turkish in both monolingual and bilingual populations with SLI such as German-Turkish, English-Turkish, Dutch-Turkish have shown that these children have also significant problems in the use of morphology and syntax similar as the results of other studies done for other many languages. In this study it is aimed to define the morphology and syntax features of bilinguals speaking Turkish-Kurdish with SLI and to compare these features to the bilinguals speaking Turkis-Kurdish who have typical language development and the monolinguals speaking Turkish with SLI. For this aim, some steps have been followed. Firstly, in order to analyze the grammar, in the aspects of morphology and syntax, in detail, Turkish versions of Test of Early Language Development Third Edition and Test of Language Development Primary Fourth Edition was used and spontaneous language samples were taken. The language sample was analyzed using Turkish version of Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) and compared to each groups. Findings show that bilingual children with SLI do not differ from the monolingual children with SLI in the aspect of their morphology and syntax features. These findings are similar to the previous studies done about the topic. Keywords: Bilingualism, Specific Language Impairment, Turkish, Kurdish