Early lexical composition of Turkish-Dutch bilinguals: Nouns before verbs or verbs before nouns

• Authors: Fatma Hülya Özcan , Feyza Altinkamiş , Steven Gillis
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Nouns and verbs are considered as fundamental categories of lexical development, and there are contradicting views on the order of the acquisition. One view claims that nouns are acquired earlier than verbs and this primacy of nouns can be attributed to perceptual-conceptual constraints from a linguistic point of view, on the other hand, nouns and verbs are the lexical units which categorically highlight language-general and language-specific characteristics. These language-specific characteristics have motivated this research because of the different typological characteristics between Turkish and Dutch in terms of nouns and verbs. The aim of this study is two-fold: to investigate the Dutch and Turkish lexicon of Turkish-Dutch bilingual children with respect to noun-verb categories and to consider the role of gender. Our sample comprised 55 Turkish-Dutch bilingual children aged between 9 and 36 months. We found that age, language and gender are at play during early lexical development. Vocabulary develops after 12 months and nouns are prioritized over verbs both in comprehension and production.

Keywords

EN

noun-verb bias; Turkish-Dutch bilinguals; early lexicon

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 583-604

Dates

published

2016-11-01

online

2016-11-16

Contributors

author

Fatma Hülya Özcan

• Anadolu University, Eskişehir

author

Feyza Altinkamiş

• University of Ghent

author

Steven Gillis

• University of Antwerp

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2016-0023