Acquisition of Adjectives in a Bilingual Setting: a Developmental Profile of Turkish-Danish Bilinguals

Abstract

Acquisition of adjectives by bilingual Turkish children have been touched upon by Boeschoten (1990), Pfaff (1991), Schmidt (2007), and these studies concluded that "the other language" has an effect on Turkish. Ozcan (2013) showed that both age and gender have an effect on the acquisition of adjectives and that 7th grade (around the age of 1213) is a turning point. Taking the findings of these studies as a starting point, we aimed to draw a developmental profile in the use of adjectives in Turkish in the bilingual setting regarding form (simple vs. derivational or complex), function (predicative vs. attributive), age and gender. The present study was designed as a longitudinal study and the data came from spontaneous conversations of Turkish-Danish bilingual school children between the 1st and 8th grades in order to see the developmental profile. In each grade, two subgroups, a boys-only group and a girls-only group, were included in the analysis in order to reveal any possible gender differences in the data. The data was analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively using the CHILDES database. The results showed that age does not have an effect on the acquisition of adjectives. Gender has only an effect at early ages. However, acquisition of another language has an effect on morphological accuracy and on the developmental profile.