Acquisition of scope relations by Turkish-English bilingual children

This is a bidirectional case study in the acquisition of semantics by Turkish – English bilingual children. The research question is whether bilingual children acquiring Turkish and English use parental input versus a principle of language learnability, as the basis for their initial interpretation of sentences with a temporal connective (English before, Turkish önce) and disjunction (Turkish ya da, English or). According to the learnability principle, bilingual children were expected to initially assign the same interpretation to the target sentences in both languages, despite differences in the input from adult speakers. The findings of the study confirmed this prediction, and are taken as evidence in support of the principle of language learnability, called the Semantic Subset Principle.