Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Bilingual Acquisition of Turkish and Kurmanji Kurdish

世界上有很多人会说两种语言。同时学习两种语言的孩子和只学习一种语言的孩子学得不同吗？社会环境和父母态度如何影响双语儿童的语言习得？在国家科学基金会的支持下，Laura Mahalingappa女士将进行研究，旨在回答这些关于儿童同时习得两种语言的语言、文化和家庭因素的问题；她将比较库尔德儿童对库尔德语和土耳其语的学习与单语儿童的语言发展。土耳其语和库尔德语在语法上非常不同；他们的语法差异可能会让我们对双语语言的发展有独特的见解。以前没有对库尔德语的习得进行过调查，即使是在单语者中。在土耳其东部为期一年的实地考察中，Mahalingappa女士将追踪三组儿童的发展情况：土耳其单语儿童、库尔德单语儿童和土耳其-库尔德双语儿童。她将纵向跟踪三个年龄组；结果将是18个月至4岁半儿童语言发展的综合图景。这些来自自然语境的数据将被实验任务所补充，这些实验任务将探索儿童在土耳其语和库尔德语中特定语法结构的发展。此外，还将对家长进行访谈，了解他们在家庭中的语言使用情况，以及他们对两种语言和各自社区的态度。在她的分析中，Mahalingappa女士将评估和比较单语儿童和双语儿童在语法发展的各个阶段。这项研究将促进我们对儿童如何习得库尔德语的理解，库尔德语是土耳其及其邻国伊拉克、伊朗和叙利亚的一种重要的少数民族语言。通过研究说土耳其语和库尔德语的儿童的双语语言发展，我们对双语语言发展的总体理解将得到推进。这个项目更广泛的影响在于它给土耳其和库尔德社区的专家带来了好处。通过对土耳其-库尔德语双语情况的调查，本研究将进一步研究涉及土耳其语的双语情况，并可以为土耳其双语的未来提供见解，从而使关注少数群体教育的教育者和决策者受益。库尔德语社区的长期利益将是提供关于库尔德儿童语言发展的规范模式的信息，这些结果将有助于在库尔德语国家工作的教育工作者和语言病理学家。

Much of the world's population is bilingual. Do children learning two languages at the same time learn differently from children learning just one? How do social context and parental attitudes affect bilingual children's acquisition of language? With support from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Laura Mahalingappa will conduct research aimed at answering these questions about the linguistic, cultural, and familial factors involved in children's acquisition of two languages simultaneously; she will compare Kurdish children's learning of both Kurdish and Turkish with language development in their monolingual counterparts. Turkish and Kurdish are grammatically very different; their grammatical differences may allow unique insights into bilingual language development. The acquisition of Kurdish has not been previously investigated, even in monolinguals. Over the course of a year of fieldwork in eastern Turkey, Ms. Mahalingappa will track the development of three groups of children: Turkish monolinguals, Kurdish monolinguals, and Turkish-Kurdish bilinguals. She will follow three age groups longitudinally; the result will be a composite picture of language development in children between eighteen months and four-and-a-half years of age. These data from naturalistic contexts will be supplemented by experimental tasks that will probe children's development of specific grammatical constructions in Turkish and Kurdish. In addition, parents will be interviewed about language use in the home and about their attitudes towards the two languages and their respective communities. In her analyses, Ms. Mahalingappa will assess and compare stages in the grammatical development of both monolingual and bilingual children. This research will advance our understanding of how children acquire Kurdish, a crucial minority language in Turkey and in the neighboring countries of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. By examining bilingual language development in children who speak Turkish and Kurdish, our general understanding of bilingual language development will be advanced. The broader impacts of this project lie in its benefits for specialists on Turkey and the Kurdish community. By investigating Turkish-Kurdish bilingualism, this study will further research on bilingual situations involving Turkish and can provide insights into the future of bilingualism in Turkey, thereby benefiting educators and policy makers who are concerned with the education of minority groups. A long-term benefit to Kurdish-speaking communities will be to provide information about normative patterns of language development in Kurdish children, results that will assist educators and speech pathologists working in Kurdish-speaking countries.