Sesletim İşlemleri: İngilizce ve Türkçe Edinen İki Dilli Bir Çocuktan Örnekler

Abstract

This paper explores the phonological processes observed in the language of a Turkish-English bilingual child. Children exposed to more than one language from very early on, go through a process in which they have to deal with two systems at once. Whether we adopt the view that children treat the systems of two languages as one system or that they treat them as two separate systems, they have to process two sets of data. Although there is support in literature that phonological processes children go through do not exhibit striking differences among languages, we expected differences due to the transparency of Turkish syllable structure compared to syllable structure of English. The data came from two sources: (a) a diary kept by the mother, who is a native speaker of English; (b) spontaneous speech samples collected by the researcher. The data, then, were analyzed and classified in terms of types of phonological processes. The results indicate that the child went through similar processes in both languages; at the earlier stage, he showed a preference for CV syllables and for simplification of the syllables with complex structures in both languages.