Morpheme-based incremental processing in head-final child language

Humans rapidly interpret utterances as soon as the words become available rather than postponing interpretation until the end of a sentence (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995) and they use locally available linguistic cues to form semantic and syntactic anticipations about the upcoming structure (Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Kamide, Scheepers, & Altmann, 2003). How about a developing parser? Real-time processing studies in children suggest that children use adult-like parsing mechanisms (Snedeker, 2009; Clahsen, 2008; Trueswell & Gleitman, 2007; McKee, 1996). Yet, there are crucial open questions as to whether this also holds for head-final languages considering the conflicting offline findings as to whether children can interpret morphosyntactic cues independent of the verb or other accompanying reliable cues (e.g., Dittmar, Abbot-Smith & Tomasello, 2008; Ural, Yüret, Ketrez, Koçbas, & Küntay, 2009; Göksun, Küntay, & Naigles, 2008; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Trueswell, Kaufman, Hafri, & Lidz, 2012; cf., an online study with Korean children by Choi & Trueswell, 2010). I will summarize our recent work with Turkish-speaking children within the context of a limited online work with children acquiring head-final languages to explore the extent to which child parsing shares the adult-like processing features. I will review our findings from (i) a self-paced listening study on the processing of relative clauses that reveals incremental integration of case marking cues into structure building (Özge, Marinis & Zeyrek, 2010; to appear), (ii) an eye-tracking study that reveals predictive interpretation of case marking cues independent of the verb (Özge, Küntay & Snedeker, 2013), and (iii) two-offline studies on the comprehension of relative clauses revealing that morpheme ambiguity contributes to subject-object asymmetry in Turkish (Özge, Marinis & Zeyrek, 2009) and that children are able to assign thematic roles purely relying on verbal morphemes when the available morpheme is unambiguous (Özge, Özkan, Uzundağ, Küntay & Snedeker, 2014). Overall, I will argue that children are as incremental as adults in their processing of morphosyntax.