Author :
DOI : 10.29228/ijla.40383
Year-Number: 2020-31
Yayımlanma Tarihi: 2020-01-09 15:53:26.0
Language : English
Konu : Linguistics
Abstract
Tümce sözcük, bir bütün olan anlamlı bir düşünceyi ifade etmek için küçük çocuklar tarafından kullanılan tek bir kelimedir. Rowe ve Levine (2015) tarafından tanımlandığı gibi, tümce sözcükler aslında birden fazla kelime ile ifade edilebilen ancak çocuklar tarafından tek kelime olarak algılanan ifadelerdir. Tümce sözcüklerin çocuk dilinde yaygın olarak kullanılmasını göz önünde bulundurarak, bu vaka çalışması, 16 ila 19 ay yaş aralığındaki anadili Türkçe olan ve sadece bu dili konuşabilen çocukların kullandığı tümce sözcük miktarları arasındaki farkları bulmayı amaçlamıştır. Bu çalışmada ayrıca anadil edinimi sırasında anadili Türkçe olan ve yine sadece bu dili konuşabilen çocuklar tarafından kullanılan tümce sözcüklerin işlevlerini tanımlamak amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmanın başka bir amaçı ise çocuk dilindeki tümce sözcüklerin farklı kategori ve işlevlerini göz önünde bulundurarak en sık kullanılanlarını ortaya koymaktır. Bu amaçlar doğrultusunda, araştırma sorularına cevap bulmak için bir örnek olay çalışması ve betimsel analiz tekniği kullanılmıştır. Çalışmaya 1;4 ve 1;7 yaşları arasındaki beş çocuk katılmış, bu çocukların verileri çocuğa yönelik kolaylaştırılmış bir görüşme yoluyla elde edilmiş ve belirli bir zaman aralığında çocuklar tarafından kullanılan tümce sözcüklerin sayıları ve frekansları kaydedilerek ve sunulmuştur. Çalışmanın sonuçları, yaşça daha büyük çocukların sözcük dağarcıklarında daha fazla tümce sözcüklere sahip olduklarını ve sayı olarak daha fazla tümce sözcük kullandıklarını göstermiştir. Ayrıca, çocukların çoğunlukla bir nesneyi veya insanların eylemlerini tanımlamak için tümce sözcükleri kullandıkları ortaya çıkarmıştır.
Keywords
Abstract
A holophrase is a single word that is used by young children to express a whole, meaningful thought. As it is defined by Rowe and Levine (2015), holophrases are utterances that are more than one word but are perceived by children as one word. Taking the widespread use of holophrases in child language into account, this case study aimed at finding out the differences between the quantities of holophrases used by Turkish monolingual children who are between the ages of 16 and 19 months. Also, it is aimed to identify the functions of holophrases used by Turkish monolingual children during the first language acquisition phrase. Another objective was to investigate the most frequently used holophrases considering the different categories and functions in child language. In line with these purposes, the researchers employed a case study and a descriptive analysis technique was used in order to find answers to the research questions. Five children between the ages of 1;4 and 1;7 participated in the study. The data of these children were obtained through a child-directed interview, and numbers and frequencies of holophrases used by children at a specific time period were recorded and presented. The results of the study demonstrated that older children have more words in their lexicon and use more holophrases in quantity. It is also revealed that the children mostly use holophrases to define an object or the actions of the people.
Keywords
- Language is an extremely complex system, which is unceasingly subject to change.Despite the complexity and the vast amount of variation, children learn their mothertongue quickly and efficiently. Although there are many debates and discussions aboutthe issue of language acquisition, one of the most accepted ones in the literature wasgiven by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky (2004) argues that children’s ability to learn thelanguage is due to a genetically programmed organ that is in the brain. When childrenare born and are involved in linguistic environments, they directly begin to develop alanguage. However, to do that, children need to make use of the only tool they have whichis their inborn mental grammar. Chomsky (2004) defines this mental grammar asUniversal Grammar. Through Universal Grammar, newborns have the grammar of anylanguage existent in the world. For example, the language principles which account forthe emergence of English account as well for Vietnamese, Portuguese, or any otherlanguage spoken in the world (McGilvray 2005). It means that human beings come to thisworld with a unique ability to learn a language. When children are born and are exposedto a particular language or various languages in the environment, they connect thelanguage to Universal Grammar and that language becomes the native tongue. Chomsky(2004) states that Universal Grammar is available to newborns before their linguisticexperience begins. As such, Universal Grammar is available to children at the initial stateof their language learning, it leads children directly to the term which Chomsky (2004)states as generative grammar. As it is stated by da Cruz (2015), with generative grammar,children unconsciously separate the speech threads they hear around them intogrammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Furthermore, with generative grammar,children will also develop the ability to understand the structure and create infinite newlanguage expressions. When children have reached the full potential of their generativegrammar, they have reached full knowledge of the language and are able to use thelanguage fluently (Chomsky 2004). Therefore, the acquisition of language is not a passiveact by which children simply absorb the information they hear in the environment. As itis defined by Jackendoff (1994), it is an active act by which children constructunconscious principles that permit them to receive information, produce novel utterances, and use language in a variety of forms.
- Children’s language acquisition is thought to start when they say their first words.However, they have communication abilities when they are born. As it is stated by Guasti(2017), at birth infants start processing the speech stimuli of their linguistic environment,and they display a surprising sensitivity to the acoustic cues that express constructs ofnatural language (syllables, phonemes, words). Mehler et al. (1988) state that, even whenthey are in the first few days and months of life, they can make use of speech stimuli anddiscriminate their native language from a foreign language. As it is defined by da Cruz(2015), after a couple of months, the babbling strings of babies begin to be uttered withintonation patterns. Eventually, the baby language gradually starts to tune in to thelanguage in the environment. According to Jackendoff (1994), when learning a language,the child selects certain speech sounds from the ones available in the universal grammarto match those in the environment which is called phonological bootstrapping. Duringthis stage, the child selects the sounds correspondent to his/her native language and unconsciously knows how to sort them out.
- As they grow older they develop new strategies and go through some stages to learn andproduce their mother language. Acquisition of lexicon is one of these essential stages.Children learn the vocabulary of their language at a remarkable pace. At 10-12 monthsthey produce and understand some words (Oviatt 1980). This is the result of a processthat starts at around 6 months when infants display sensitivity to various phonologicalproperties of native words. Children’s vocabulary learning begins slowly, but rapidlyincreases – at the age of 16 months, children know around 40 words (Bates, Dale andThal, 1995), yet by school-age children learn up to 3000 words each year (or just above 8words every day) and a 17-year-old learns up to 10,000 words each year (or more than 27words every day), mainly through reading (Nagy and Herman, 1987). It is clear that asthey grow older they improve their lexicon by finding some connections. Thisimprovement in vocabulary quantity is referred to as vocabulary spurt during which afterhaving learned around 50 words, children suddenly and dramatically increase the rate atwhich they learn new words. This is an exciting process that raises the question of howthese infants learn to produce their first words in other words holophrases. To give ananswer to this question, the researchers put forward some ideas such as the semanticand syntactic bootstrapping. As it is stated by Pinker (1994), semantic bootstrappinghypothesis asserts that children use semantic features to get evidence for thegrammatical entities in the input. In this hypothesis, a child acquiring words needs tomap the semantic notions of the word on her/his mental representation of that concept.On the other hand, syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis argues that the meaning of somewords, especially verbs, cannot be acquired through a general mechanism because oftheir complexity. Therefore, children must use constraints provided by the language itself,and they do so by exploiting the information provided by syntax (Landau and Gleitman,1985). As it is identified by Yılmazer and Başol (2017), the main difference betweensemantic bootstrapping and the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis is the direction of themapping process. That is, the way of acquisition being either from syntactic clues tosemantic knowledge or from semantic notions to syntactic knowledge differentiates inthese two hypotheses, and it remains as a matter of curiosity (Ketrez, 1999). Despite thedifficulty in finding an accurate answer to this question, it is evident that children uttertheir first meaningful words, holophrases, at around their first birthdays to express complete and coherent communicative intentions after a long cognitive process.
- Language production is a complex process in which different phrases have been passedthrough by the children. Lightbown and Spada (2006) state that there are four differentstages in the process of language production namely; pre-language, holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic speech. According to Thuresson (2011), language production beginswith the pre-language stage where the child makes a lot of ‘cooing’ and ‘babbling’ andgoes on with holophrastic and two-word phrases. Then, it finishes with the process ofdevelopment when the child reaches the stage of telegraphic speech. One of the mostsignificant stages of language acquisition is the holophrastic stage. A holophrase is asingle word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought. It is the time whencomprehensible single units can be uttered such as ‘milk’, ‘cookie’ This kind ofexpressions have often been called a ''holophrase'' since it is a single linguistic symbolfunctioning as a whole utterance, for example, ‘That!’ meaning ``I want that'' or ‘Ball?’ meaning ``Where's the ball?'' (Barrett 1986).
- It is a well-known fact that children are very good at word learning. From their firstbirthday on, they acquire hundreds of new words in quite a short time (Clark, 2009). Thisperiod is the time when they begin to use holophrases. As it is stated by Tomasello andBrooks (1999), those holophrases are used by the children at about 12-15 months of age.Hence, a large number of these utterances are utilized in a sense to name objects, andsome others attempt to make a statement which the child is not able to express yet.Holophrases come in many forms; they do not just correspond to single adult words. Togive an example, the child could use the word ‘Sarah’ to emphasize that Sarah’s bed isempty. Although the child is in possession of the lexical items Sarah and bed in theirmental lexicon, it is not ready to produce a more complicated combination with these(Yule, 1996). As stated by Dominey (2006), from the perspective of learning complexity,this means that rather than mastering the grammar used by an adult to generate orunderstand an utterance, the child can exploit more direct correspondences betweenfixed utterances and their meanings in the form of holophrases, and then progressivelyapply procedures for generalization in order to develop an abstract argument constructionrepertoire. In short, it can be stated that infants come to language acquisition at aroundtheir first birthdays with an understanding of various real-life scenes and someparalinguistic ways of communicating about them. They soon learn to talk about thesescenes using conventional linguistic expressions, holophrases, taken from the relatively fully formed adult constructions they hear used for these scenes.
- The Turkish language is among the world’s major languages with the geography wherethe Turkish language is spoken and the number of individuals speaking Turkish. Whilethe number of Turkish speaking individuals is approximately 150 million worldwide, thenumber of individuals speaking Turkish is approximately 70 million (Ercilasun, 1997).The Turkish language is an agglutinating language. This means that endings are addedone by one to the root of a word to produce the desired meaning. In respect of structure,the language is within the adjacency structure (agglutinative) group languages. Therefore,the stem remains without any changes. Thanks to affixes/ suffixes with various tasksgiven to the stem, new notions are met (Özkan, 2006). As it is stated by Aksan, (1995),the richness of meaning in the Turkish language depends on the functionality of theaffixes/ suffixes. Affixes/ suffixes being brought to the stem and attributing variousmeanings through fulfilling their tasks separately supports the expression. This situationmay be the most critical feature of the Turkish language. Like in every language, the useof holophrases in Turkish is a prevalent issue. However, there are some differencesbetween the one-word acquisition and production time of the Turkish and Englishmonolingual children. In Turkish, the words are typically composed of a sequence ofmorphs with each morph representing one morpheme. There is an unchanging root andone or more suffixes are used for a derivation; hence it has great word-building capacity.As stated by Aksu and Slobin (1985), in Turkish the inflectional system appears early,and the entire set of noun inflections and much of the verbal paradigm are mastered by24 months of age or earlier. By this age, Turkish children inflect nouns for case(accusative, dative, ablative, possessive, instrumental) and number (plural), and verbs fortense-aspect (past result, ongoing process, intention), person, negation, andinterrogation. However, before that age, the Turkish children use one-word utterances orholophrases as described by Tomasello and Brooks (1999), for specific communicational intentions.
- It is clear from Table 2 that while the children who are at the age of 1;4 produced 50holophrases, the children at the age of 1;7 produced 72 holophrases. The averageholophrase production for the children at the age of 16 months is 16,66, however, theaverage number of the holophrases produced by 19 months old children are two timeshigher (34) than those of 17 months old children. It is evident from the study that olderchildren gradually learn more phrases and expand their lexicon by improving bothproduction and comprehension of the first language as they grow up. As it is defined byDapretto and Bjork (2000) following the onset of expressive language, the rate of wordacquisition is initially rather slow, with children learning only a few new words permonth. Toward the end of the second year, children typically display a sudden spurt invocabulary growth, roughly after their productive lexicons have reached 50–100 words.The results presented in the table have some common points with the study of Fenson etal. (1994) who demonstrated that there is a wide variation in children's holophrasesscores, but that on average production vocabulary shows a rapid increase towards theend of the second year, while comprehension vocabulary increases in a more linear fashion.
- As can be observed in Table 3, there are eight types of holophrases being used to answerdifferent communicational goals of the children. The information about the number andfrequency of the holophrases obtained from the analysis of five participant children’s datais presented in detail. When the researcher analyzed the participants’ data, it can beobserved that the participants of the study mostly use holophrases in order to request orindicate the existence of objects (42,62%). Other frequent uses of holophrases are torequest or describe the actions of people (23,77%), asking some basic questions (7,37%)and attribute a property to an object (7,37%). However, the participants have lesstendency to use holophrases so as to request or describe dynamic events involving objects(4,09%), to use performatives to mark specific social events and situations (4,09%), torequest or describe the recurrence of objects or events (4,91%) and to comment on thelocation of objects and people (5,73%). It is clear that the children generally useholophrases to define an object or the actions of the people by producing nouns andverbs. The result of the first question goes in hand with the study of Crystal (1997) whofound that the most common word classes and holophrases are nouns (ca.60%) and verbs(ca.20%). As it is also stated by Sofu (1995), the first acquired lexical items in the child'sspeech are nouns, and nouns are used more frequently by children as compared to verbs.The reason for the dominance of object and verb names lies in the difference betweencontent and function words. It seems to be generally accepted that open class or contentwords appear earlier in children’s speech than function words (Fernald & Marchman,2006). As a result, the participants’ frequent use of nouns and verbs that are under thecategory of content words might be the consequence of the early emergence of these open class words in Turkish monolingual children’s speeches.
- Table 4 indicates the most frequently used holophrases as well as their numbers andfrequencies. It is clear that for the first type of holophrases used to request or indicate theexistence of objects, ‘mama’ is the most recurrent word having a frequency of 19,23%.The most frequent holophrase for the second category is ‘başka’ with the number of 3and a frequency of 50%. When it comes to the third type which is related to thedescription of dynamic events involving objects, the most repeated holophrase is ‘aç’(40%). While the holophrase ‘gel’ is the most frequent one for the fourth type (17,24%),‘burda’ is the most repeated holophrase within the fifth category dealing with the locationof objects and people (71,42%). It is also apparent from the table that the most recurrentholophrase for the sixth type is ‘kaç?’ (44,44%), and the most frequent one for theseventh type is the holophrase of ‘iyi’ (44,44%). On the other hand, for the eighth type ofholophrases involving the use of performatives to mark specific social events andsituations. ‘baybay’ has a frequency of 60%. Considering the numbers and thefrequencies of the holophrases, it can be concluded that the children have more nounsand verbs in their vocabulary than the adjectives, prepositions and question words. It isalso clear that the children between the ages of 1;4 and 1;7 can use holophrases to markspecific social events and situations, to attribute a property to an object and to ask somebasic questions. The results of the third research question are consistent with the studyof Tomasello and Brooks (1999) who found that the children at the age of 12-18 months old can use holophrases to voice various intentions.
- The aim of this study was to find out the differences between the quantities ofholophrases used by Turkish monolingual children who are 16 and 19 months old. Inaddition, it is aimed to identify the functions of holophrases used by Turkish monolingualchildren during the first language acquisition phrase. Another objective is to examine themost frequently used holophrases considering the different categories and functions inchild language. The results of the study demonstrated that older children (at the age of1;7) have more words in their lexicon and use more holophrases in quantity. It is evidentfrom the study that older children gradually learn more phrases and expand their lexiconby improving both production and comprehension of the first language as they grow up.As it is defined by Fenson et. Al. (1994), as the children get older, their vocabularyincreases dramatically, and their rate of learning new words also increases up to 300words by 24 months which is named ‘vocabulary spurt’. There are some theories for thisdramatic increase in holophrase use in child speech. One of the most influential claimsabout the vocabulary spurt is that it coincides with a significant cognitive change: thenaming insight, which is the realization that words refer to things or that all things havenames (Reznick and Goldfield, 1992). Once children have this insight, the theory holds,they begin to acquire words at a rapid pace. Another theory is that the spurt marks achange in children’s object concepts. Lifter and Bloom (1989) stated that infants begin touse words, then, show a vocabulary spurt as their object concepts become more detailed and differentiated.
- Another striking result of the study is the fact that the children mostly use holophrases todefine an object or the actions of the people. They also use them to request or describethe recurrence of objects or events, ask some basic questions, to mark specific socialevents and situations and comment on the location of objects and people. The results ofthe research go parallel with the study of Tomasello and Brooks (1999) who illustratedthat the children at the age of 12-18 months old can use holophrases to voice variousintentions. It is also revealed that the children at the age of 18 months old have morenouns and verbs in their vocabulary than the adjectives, prepositions and questionwords. This result is supported by the study of Crystal (1997) who found that the mostcommon word classes and holophrases are nouns (ca.60%) and verbs (ca.20%) and by thestudy of Gentner (1978) who illustrated that children's first words are primarily nouns and verbs.
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