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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 591

Part of Session 188: Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages (Other abstracts in this session)

Syntactic complexity in oral and written texts in French and Turkish of bilingual children and teenagers in France

Authors: AKINCI, Mehmet-Ali
Submitted by: Akinci, Mehmet-Ali (Dynamique du Langage (CNRS - Université Lyon 2), France)

This presentation aims to characterize the developmental profile of syntactic complexity in oral and written texts in French and Turkish of bilingual children and teenagers in France. Connectives are analysed as indicators of syntactic complexity. In a linear sequence of oral and written texts, connectives contribute to its structure by marking semantic relations between clauses or sequences (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). From a cognitive viewpoint, it is necessary for a speaker or a writer to analyze beforehand the event as an association of two or several components and to perceive that two situations can be built as belonging to only one event (Fayol, 1997). That is why acquiring competences to combine clauses in order to produce oral texts and coherent writings is a sign of development which extends well beyond childhood (Jisa, 1987, Verhoeven et al. 2002).
The present study is part of a larger crosslinguistic study of bilingual language development of older children and adolescents in France and Germany. The method employed adapts that used by Berman & Verhoeven (2002) to be appropriate to the investigation of multilingual competencies. Our corpus consists of data from bilinguals in four age-groups: 5th (grade school), 7th (secondary school) and 10th and 12th grades (high school). In each age-group, at least 20 subjects were asked to produce in their both languages (Turkish and French) two types of text (personal narration and expository) in two modalities (spoken and written). In this paper, we focus on types of semantic link (temporal, additive, causal and adversative), the form and whether the form is used as a syntactic connector or text organizer in order to answer the following questions:
1.    Is there any developmental observation of syntactic complexity by the bilingual children and teenagers with age?
2.    Which are the values of the conjunctions which express semantic relations?
3.    Is there any difference between both languages (Turkish vs French)?
4.    Does syntactic complexity differ according to type (narrative and expository texts) and modality (oral and written) of text?
Comparison of narratives vs expository texts show more causal connectives in expository texts and more adversative ones in written texts of high school children. As for text modality comparison (written vs oral texts), on the one hand, specific connectives are used in both modalities and both languages (i.e. Turkish: yani ‘that is to say; French: parce que/car ‘because’), and on the other hand, oral texts contain more temporal connectives while in written texts there are more additive forms. Compared to older bilingual children and teenagers (high school students), young ones (primary and secondary pupils) appear to be delayed in using the full range of devices available in Turkish (weak language) and not in their French.