Acquisition of passives in Turkish

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the acquisition of passive constructions in Turkish and to shed light on the path that Turkish children follow in their acquisition of passives in different constructions. Turkish, as an agglutinative language, marks the passive voice on the verb as a suffix which has allomorphs determined by final sounds of verbs. Thus, we predict that children would experience difficulty in sorting out the restrictions on the passive marker. Being the first experimental study focusing on the production of Turkish passives, the present study aims at filling an important gap in the acquisition, in particular production of a voice morpheme in Turkish. In order to figure out this path, elicited production task was administered to 67 Turkish monolingual children (age range 2;2 to 7;5) as the experimental group and 4 Turkish monolingual adults (the control group). Children have been divided into four developmental groups. Passive use was tested in two contexts: passive in the affirmative, generic and passive in the –mAz construction. The experiment involved 71 verb types and 85 tokens which differed in their final sounds, in being monosyllabic or multisyllabic, and in their transitivity. The findings of the current study indicate that although children’s passive use starts early, they do not follow an errorless path. Particularly, children aged between 3;10 and 5;3 commit a high number of irregularization errors, which suggests that they entertain a variety of hypotheses in deciding on the regular and irregular passive markers in the acquisition process and for a certain period they employ the irregular passive morpheme as a default passive marker. However, with the enhancement in their linguistic capacity and in the abundance of counter evidence, with age they manage to use appropriate passive markers. In addition to that, it has been found out that all children’s passive use increased with age and in general performed much better in the production of passives in -mAz construction compared to passive use in affirmative contexts. In brief, the present study shows that the acquisition of passives in Turkish is not an error-free process; rather it is a developmental process during which children exploit a number of linguistic and non-linguistic sources.