ANALYZING THE TURKISH PRESCHOOLERS’ NATIVE LANGUAGE USE IN RESPECT OF THE
CONTENT & FUNCTION WORDS
Authors: Kabadayı Abdülkadir 
Published: February 2021

Human beings come to the World by the innate capacity of learning and using the language in the society they were born. Learning any language is the most important gift given by the God to the human beings. Any child should have some difficulties or hard experience in the process of acquiring his / her mother tongue. Therefore, it is inevitable for a child to make some mistakes in the acquisition process. Content and the function words in any language are the language elements exposed to be discussed. Less is known about differences in how content and function words are produced. Therefore, it is highly important to analyze the situation of the children’s use of the content and function words in the process of their language use. The purpose of this research is to analyze the content & function words the preschoolers use in acquiring their native language, Turkish. As it is a longitudinal study Qualitative research method was used to collect the study data. The aim is to reveal to what rate and to what extend the children use content & function words most during their free time activities, language activities, nature and science activities, and drama activities etc. 76 children participated in the research. 33 of them were female and the 43 of them were male. The participants were 5 and 6 years old. They are still dwelling in Konya and Manisa the districts of Turkey. The findings were classified under linguistics categories as nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronoun, prepositions, prefix, suffix and affixes etc. In this research, 5-year-old preschoolers used 30 percent of the language units in the CONTENT words frame while 6-year-old preschoolers used 70 percent of the language units in the FUNCTION words frame. Males used 54 percent and female used 46 percent of the NOUNS including common, proper noun, abstract, concrete, singular and Psychology - Medicine - Education Science and Education, 2020, Issue 2 65 plural nouns. 5-year-old preschoolers used 27 percent of the VERBS while 6-year-old preschoolers used 73 percent of them CONTENT words. In this research, males used 58 percent and female used 42 percent of the ADJECTIVES in CONTENT words. In this research, males used 47 percent and female used 53 percent of the PRONOUNS including personal, denotative, interrogative and transformative pronouns in FUNCTION words. 5-year-old preschoolers used 25 percent of the ADVERBS while 6-year-old preschoolers used 75 percent of the ADVERBS in CONTENT words. In this research, males used 30 percent and female used 70 percent of the PREPOSITIONS including in FUNCTION words. Males used 48 percent and female used 52 percent of the CONJUCTIONS in FUNCTION words. Males used 35 percent and female used 65 percent of the GERUNDS in CONTENT words. 5-year-old preschoolers used 30 percent of the STRUCTURE OF VERBS while 6-year-old preschoolers used 70 percent of the STRUCTURE OF VERBS comprising transitive, intransitive, causative, active, passive and transformative structures in CONTENT words. Males used 48 percent and female used 52 percent of the INFLACTIONALS in FUNCTION words. As a last remark, some recommendations will be made to the teachers and the parents of the preschoolers about the descriptive result of the study.