Acquisition of the Word Order among Toddlers: Reflections from Turkish, Sesotho, Japanese, and Polish

Year 2023, Volume: 20 Issue: 2, 14 - 24, 01.01.2024

Ömer Eren

Abstract

Word order has been an interesting topic since systematic studies on language acquisition and the existence of linguistic principles in even radically different languages show the presence of innate constraints. Children are sensitive to the word order phenomena, and they correctly fix the value of the parameter by discovering the regularities of the language at a very early phase. Current studies mostly deal with strict word order languages like English and French. This study is intended to observe whether this basic order can be observed in languages with free word order among toddlers between 2:0 and 3:0 years old. Speech transcripts from Turkish, Sesotho, Japanese and Polish in the CHILDES database were examined, and findings show that toddlers speaking free word-order languages can make sentences with different word orders at those ages. The correct acquisition of word order in various languages that have radically different word order indicates that toddlers have an innate ability to overcome quite different syntactic properties of any language.

Keywords

Language acquisition, word order, child language, syntactic, CHILDES

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