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

世界上大部分人口都能说两种语言。 同时学习两种语言的孩子和只学习一种语言的孩子学习的方式不同吗？ 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，旨在回答有关儿童同时获得两种语言的语言，文化和家庭因素的问题;她将比较库尔德儿童学习库尔德语和土耳其语与单语儿童的语言发展。 土耳其语和库尔德语在语法上有很大的不同;它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。库尔德语的习得以前没有调查过，即使是单语者。 在土耳其东部为期一年的实地考察中，Mahalingappa女士将跟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;结果将是一个18个月到4岁半儿童语言发展的综合图片。这些数据从自然的情况下，将补充实验任务，将探讨儿童的发展，在土耳其语和库尔德语的具体语法结构。 此外，还将对父母进行访谈，了解他们在家中的语言使用情况，以及他们对这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和双语儿童的语法发展阶段。这项研究将促进我们对儿童如何获得库尔德语的理解，库尔德语是土耳其以及伊拉克，伊朗和叙利亚等邻国的一种重要少数民族语言。 通过研究讲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一般理解将得到提高。 该项目更广泛的影响在于其对土耳其和库尔德社区专家的好处。通过调查土耳其-库尔德双语，这项研究将进一步研究涉及土耳其的双语情况，并可以提供见解双语在土耳其的未来，从而有利于教育工作者和政策制定者谁是关注少数群体的教育。对库尔德语社区的一个长期利益将是提供有关库尔德儿童语言发展的规范模式的信息，其结果将有助于在库尔德语国家工作的教育工作者和言语病理学家。

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.