Noun and verb derivations in early Turkish child and child-directed speech

Abstract

This chapter presents the emergence of derivational morphology in nouns and verbs in the speech of two Turkish-speaking monolingual girls between the ages 1;3 and 3;0, taking into account the patterns in their child-directed speech. Derivational morphology emerges early, before age 3;0, although compounding is an option in addition to derivation in the language. In both children’s speech the causative is the first derivational morpheme and it emerges simultaneously with inflections followed by other types of derivations. Instrument nouns emerge earlier than agent nouns in both children’s speech. The study further shows that children with different developmental paces follow similar paths in their acquisition of derivational morphology and their speech reflect the derivational patterns in their child-directed speech. © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company