ÇUKUROVA UNIVERSITY THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE SUBJECT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CHILDREN'S EARLY LEXICON IN TERMS OF NOUN/VERB DOMINANCE

CHILDREN’S EARLY LEXICON IN TERMS OF NOUN/VERB DOMINANCE N. Feyza Altinkamis TURKAY Ph. D. Dissertation, English Language Teaching Department Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hatice SOFU October 2005, 144 pages Specific categories are investigated in many studies in order to gain a complementary point of view about children’s lexical development, such as noun, verb or adjective. The main aim of those studies is to see whether a particular conceptualization pattern becomes priviliged over another one and how this affects children’s language development. A great number of research findings reveal that nouns are acquired earlier than verbs because basic level object categories are represented by nouns, leading to dominance of nouns over verbs. This noun-before-verb acquisition pattern is universal regardless of the language. However, some researchers are in disagreement with this claim and they propose that verbs can be acquired earlier than nouns as children are exposed to more verbs in the maternal input. This constitutes the other end of this controversial topic. Therefore, the arguments show two opposite ends: universal conceptual constraints versus language characteristics. The primacy of nouns or verbs have been studied in different languages, such as English, German, Korean and Chinese by using various data collection tools. However, this issue was not studied in Turkish by means of longitudinal data-frequency analysis. That is why, this study mainly concentrated on Turkish speaking children’s lexical development in terms of noun and verb categories. In addition, the distributional properties of those categories in Turkish child-directed speech was studied. In order to see the progressive development of nouns and verbs, the data collection period lasted nearly thirteen months. Five Turkish speaking children were video-recorded during their routine interactions with their mothers. Then, the transcribed data was computed with CHILDES, freq analysis. Next, children were focused on individually with a particular reference to noun and verb development. In line with this, the freq analysis was conducted on the mothers’ child-directed speech. Then, mothers’ frequent use of noun and verb categories was correlated with that of children’s. In addition to this analysis, each child’s noun, verb and overall lexical development was given through line graphs in order to see the progressive changes during the data collection period of the study. Each child’s noun and verb development pattern was compared to her mother’s noun and verb use to see whether any parallelism could be observed. The findings of the study indicated that the frequency of nouns in Turkish speaking children’s early lexicon was not considerably higher than their verbs. Nouns became statistically dominant over verbs in a very limited number of observed times. The results of this study supported an important point regarding noun and verb acquisition pattern. In all children, verb acquisition was more progressive, whereas the nouns were context-dependent. In some children, towards the end of the data collection period, a higher verb frequency over nouns was seen.