Phonological acquisition of Turkish children: implications for phonological disorders

Abstract

Abstracts The study reported describes the phonological rules typical of normal development of Turkish‐speaking children. The processes identified include: reduplication, syllable deletion, consonant deletion, assimilation, cluster reduction, liquid deviation, stopping, fronting, affrication, and backing. From a crosslinguistic perspective, the phonological process patterns exhibited coincide broadly with universal tendencies, although some language specific patterns were also evident. In contrast, a case study of a phonologically disordered child indicated that her system was characterised by the use of idiosyncratic phonological rules as well as delayed acquisition of some aspects of the system. This atypical pattern reflects reports of phonologically disordered children learning other languages. The findings indicate that the deficit underlying this type of phonological disorder leads to similar phonological behaviour irrespective of the language being acquired. L'etude dont on rend compte décrit les règles phonologiques typiques du développement normal d'enfants turcophones. Les procédés identifiés comprennent: le redoublement, l'élision de syllabes et de consonnes, l'assimilation, la réduction des groupes consonantiques, la déviation des liquides, l'utlisation d'occlusives, de sons d'avant, l'affrication et l'utilisation de sons d'arrière. D'un point de vue comparatif, les modèles de procédés phonologiques mis en évidence coincident en gros avec les tendances universalles, quoique l'on remarque aussi certains modèles particulier au turc. Par contre, une étude de cas d'un enfant présentant des difficultés phonologiques a montré son système se caractèrisait par l'usage de règles phonologiques individuelles, et aussi par l'usage de règles phonologiques individuelles, et aussi par des retards dans l'acquisition de certains aspects due système. Ce modèle atypique reflète ce que l'on sait de l'apprentissage d'autres langues par des enfants souffrant de troubles phonologiques. Ces résultats indiquent que la déficience qui sous‐tend ce type de trouble phonologique aboutit à un compartement phonologique semblable quel que soit le langage en cours d'acqusition. Diese Studie beschreibt die phonologischen Regeln, die bei normaler Entwicklung fur türkischsprechende Kinder typisch sind. Die indentifizierten Prozesse waren u.a. Reduplikation, Silbentilgung, Konsonantentilgung, Assimilation, Konsonantengruppenreduktion, Liquidenabweichung, Verschlußbildung, Anteriorverschiebung (‘fronting’), Affrizierung und Posteriorverschiebung (‘backing’). Aus übersprachlicher Sicht stimmen die beobachteten Prozeßmuster mit universellen Tendenzen überein, obwohl einige sprachspezifische Muster auch in Erscheinung traten. Im Gegensatz dazu zeigte eine Fallstudie eines phonologisch gestörten Kindes ein System mit idiosynkratischen phonologischen Regeln und auch den verzögerten Erwerb einiger Aspekte des normalen Systems. Atypische Muster dieser Art sind in Berichten über phonologisch gestörte Kinder beim Erwerb in anderen Sprachen zu finde...

Do case and gender information assist sentence comprehension and repetition for German- and Hebrew-speaking children?

“…Other case markings are acquired even later. Acquisition of case in languages with a different case system seems to start a little earlier around age one and a half (e.g., see for data on Russian Babyonyshev, 1993; for data on Turkish Aksu- Koç and Slobin, 1985;Topbaş, 1997; and for data on Finnish Laalo, 2002). All these studies examined spontaneous speech samples, which gives a first indication of the children's abilities to realize case morphology, but has the disadvantage that this cannot be tested systematically, since some contexts may be more or less frequent in children's spontaneous speech.…”

Specific language impairment in Turkish: Evidence from case morphology in Turkish–German successive bilinguals

“…As Topbaş (1997) reveals, the first case suffixes to be produced are dative and accusative markings from the age of 1;3 onwards (cf. Table II).…”

“…In addition to studies on phonological disorders (Topbaş, 1997;1999), there are some studies aimed at describing 'delayed' or 'atypical' language acquisition (Topbaş, Maviş, and Erbaş, 2003;. Grammatical impairments in monolingual Turkish children have not as yet been studied in detail (cf.…”

Does the speech of Turkish‐speaking phonologically disordered children differ from that of children speaking other languages?

“…Although there have not been many studies, different aspects of acquisition have been studied in normal and disordered Turkish children recently by Topbaş, 1988Topbaş, , 1994Topbaş, , 1996Topbaş, , 1997Topbaş, , 2004aAcarlar & Ege, 1996;Ketrez, 1997;Topbaş & Konrot, 1998;Topbaş & Kopkallı-Yavuz, 1998;Kopkallı-Yavuz & Topbaş, 2000;Topbaş & Dinçer, 2002;Yavaş & Topbaş, 2004. (For detailed information reader can refer to Topbaş and Yavaş, 2006.…”

“…Turkish is one of those languages in which some aspects of universal and language specific variability have been demonstrated by applying either a process based (Topbaş, 1997;Topbaş & Konrot, 1998) or relational based approach (Topbaş & Dinçer, 2002). However, only a small number of subjects have been presented.…”