Listening To a Turkish Mother: Some Puzzles for Acquisition 1

Most studies of child-directed speech (CDS), or "input," have used English data. However, detailed studies of several other languages have begun to raise new questions, at all levels of linguistic analysis. ² In the present chapter we examine the speech of one Turkish mother, in natural settings, speaking to a child in the one-word period. Using these data, we seek to systematically explore several characteristic linguistic devices of Turkish in the light of some current claims about input and children's strategies for dealing with it. We attend, particularly, to the "puzzles" presented to a child by a language with flexible word order, complex nominal and verbal morphology, and a high rate of nominal ellipsis. These factors are relevant to current debates about the roles of nouns and verbs in early acquisition, with regard to both lexical and morphological acquisition. More broadly, we attempt to characterize the structure of CDS in a language that is different in important ways from the other types of languages that have been described in the input literature.