What Turkish Acquisition Tells Us about Underlying Word Order and Scrambling

Karin Stromswold   Natalie Batman-Ratyosyan

Children acquiring fixed word order languages almost always obey the word order 
restrictions of their language (Brown, 1973).  However, this may merely reflect 
the input children receive: children acquiring fixed word order languages may 
say "eat cookies" but not "cookies eat" because they never hear adults say the 
latter.  A critical question is whether children who are learning free word 
order languages also exhibit word orders preferences.  We investigated whether 
young Turkish speaking children are initially predisposed to prefer certain 
word orders.  Although Turkish is a free word-order language, if object NPs are 
not case-marked, SOV and OVS sentences are grammatical, whereas SVO and OSV 
sentences are not. In this study, Turkish-speaking children imitated and judged 
SOV, OVS, SVO, and OVS sentences that did not have object case-marking.  Our 
results suggest that, even though SOV and OVS orders are both grammatical in 
adult Turkish, young Turkish-speaking children treat SOV as being the primary 
word order of Turkish.  Consistent with Otsu's (1994) results for Japanese and 
Slobin and Bever's (1982) results for case-marked constructions in Turkish, 
our results indicate that even when children are exposed to linguistic input 
which indicates they are learning a free word order language, they are 
initially predisposed to treat one of these orders as being the word order for 
their language. Our results provide support to linguistic theories which argue 
that Turkish has an underlying word order and the apparent free word order of 
Turkish is the result of scrambling (Kural, 1992; Kornfilt, 1994).  These data 
are also consistent with Baker's (1988) Incorporation Theory.