A usage based approach into the acquisition of relative clauses

ABSTRACT: Previous research has shown that cross-linguistically relative clauses are acquired late and are considered as a signal of linguistic complexity. This study adapts a usage-based account of relative clause acquisition in Turkish. A corpus based on three databases including 170 recordings of naturalistic mother-child interaction was analysed. The age of children in these three databases are 02;00-03;06, 01;00-02;04 and 00;09-02;09, respectively. The analyses revealed that the use of relative clauses in both the children’s productions and in child-directed speech were extremely scarce. Though previous research underlined the linguistic complexity of relative clauses as a reason for late acquisition, the results of this study point out that scarcity of input should also be regarded as a powerful predictor. The study underlines the availability of other constructions that are functionally parallel to relative clauses. The findings suggest that such structures which are syntactically and morphologically less complex than relative clauses are common in both child directed speech and in children’s productions