Subject realization in bilinguals: A comparative study of German-Turkish and Russian-Turkish bilingual children

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the vulnerability of subject realization in Turkish as an interface structure at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The study compares subject realization of four Turkish monolingual, three German-Turkish bilingual and two Russian-Turkish bilingual children. The language combinations investigated in the study were determined by the fact that Russian is a partially null-subject language, while German is a non-null-subject one and Turkish is a null-subject language. Thus, focusing on the comparison of two different language combinations, the study aims to provide new insights about bilinguals’ subject realization patterns and their possible relation to cross-linguistic influence. The data for the study were collected by recording the natural language production of the three groups of children. Analysis of the data revealed that both the German-Turkish and the Russian-Turkish bilingual children overused overt subject pronouns in their Turkish more than their monolingual counterparts. Hence, we hypothesized that the inappropriate subject realizations of the bilingual children cannot merely be explained as evidence for cross-linguistic influence but also as a language processing problem.