Clause Chaining and Discourse Continuity in Turkish Children's Narratives

Abstract

The present study examines the development of complex sentences with non-finite clause combining with particular focus on clause chaining, in narratives of 40 Turkish-speaking 4-to 11-year-olds and six adults elicited by a wordless picture book. Results show a gradual increase by age in the variety of clauses combined, the length of the complex sentences and their frequency of use. Clause chains formed with converbal clauses are the earliest and most frequent type of clause combinations, already present in 4-year-olds' complex sentences with 1-non-finite clause. Older children's and adults' 2-or 3-non-finite clause complex sentences consist of some combinations of adverbial, complement, relative and converbal clauses. Developmentally, clause chains establish first, aspectual-temporal continuity, then temporal-causal continuity. Sentence-internal and cross-sentence-boundary referential continuities are present early, from age 4 onwards. These findings are discussed in terms of the demands of narrative organization as well as the syntactic and semantic complexity of the clause combination devices in Turkish.

The language of school writing: a developmental comparison of genres across the school years

“…The remaining construction that we focused on was complement clauses, subordinated clauses attached to a verb as in several researchers claim that the use and accessibility of the cellular device affect the socialization habits of users. Complement clauses are not difficult to produce or comprehend, and children produce them early on (Boeg Thomsen et al, 2021;Ögel-Balaban & Aksu-Koç 2020). Their importance lies in the type of predicates -especially mental verbs and adjectives -that govern such clauses (Brandt, 2020;Maekelberghe, 2021), promoting the ultimate development of Theory of Mind and social cognition.…”

Beyond the Two-Clause Sentence: Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Six Languages

“…We investigated these three topics through a synthesizing analysis of this Research Topic’s acquisition studies on three Eurasian clause-chaining languages, with many millions of speakers – Japanese ( Clancy, 1985 , 2020 2 ), Korean ( Choi, 2020 ), and Turkish ( Aksu-Koç and Slobin, 1985 ; Ögel-Balaban and Aksu-Koç, 2020 ) – as well as three under-described clause chaining languages of Papua New Guinea and Australia, each with fewer than 5000 speakers – Ku Waru ( Rumsey et al, 2020 ), Nungon ( Sarvasy, 2020 ), and Pitjantjatjara ( Defina, 2020 ). Although these studies target children between 1;1 and 10 years, our emphasis in this comparative analysis is on early development, drawing primarily on the early, qualitative, longitudinal components of these studies.…”

“…All data from the six target languages comes from these sources, except where otherwise noted. Note thatClancy (1985) covers the age range between approximately 2;0 and 3;8, where Clancy (2020) begins; similarly,Aksu-Koç and Slobin (1985) covers the age range between approximately 2;4 and 4;0, where Ögel-Balaban andAksu-Koç (2020) begins.Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org…”