Although many linguists argue that all languages share a common universal grammar, superficially languages vary tremendously. For example, some languages such as English allow only one basic word order (fixed word order languages), while languages such as Turkish permit many word orders. In addition, there are isolating languages such as Mandarin in which grammatical relationships are expressed through word order, and not by adding to or changing morphological structure of words, and languages such as Turkish in which grammatical relationships are expressed via sequences of inflectional particles, each of which expresses a specific grammatical meaning. Despite differences which exist among languages, most language acquisition research has concentrated on languages that are fixed word order and either isolating or inflecting. Investigations of agglutinative, free word order languages are necessary if we are to test explanatory and descriptive adequacy of theories of acquisition.
In this project we will use data from comprehension, imitation and judgment experiments to study the acquisition of Turkish as a first language by children between 1.5 and 6 years of age. These data will be used to address the following fundamental questions about language acquisition:
1. Are young children predisposed to assume that the language they are acquiring has a fixed word order? 2. Do they know the structural restrictions on a free word order language? 3. When do children start reconciling structural restrictions and discourse considerations in a free word order language? 4. Are young children predisposed to assume that grammatical particles are attached in a fixed order? 5. Do children acquire particles that are putatively part of a universal ordering earlier than particles that are not?
