the acquisition of relative clauses by turkmen speaking children

Researchers have engaged in a spirited debate regarding the acquisition of relative clauses for the past two decades (de villiers, tager flusberg, hakuta & cohen, 1979; sheldon, 1974; slobin, 1971; tavakolian, 1981). early studies on the comprehension of relative clauses, referred to as rcs, utilized interactive tasks involving toys, revealing that children performed randomly until the age of five. however, a subsequent study by hamburger & crain (1982) on american children, which controlled for probable processing and pragmatics effects in experimental tasks, demonstrated that four-year-olds exhibited comprehension and production abilities above chance levels. similarly, a later study by crain et al. (1990) observed the production of such sentences by two- and three-year-old italian children. the conflicting findings in studies on rc acquisition have prompted extensive research primarily focused on postnominal languages like english, german, and other european languages (sheldon, 1974; flynn & lust, 1980; tavakolian, 1981; goodluck & tavakolian, 1982; hamburger & crain, 1982; lebeaux, 1990; labelle, 1990; 1996). conversely, there is a scarcity of studies on the l1 acquisition of rcs in prenominal languages. it is crucial to consider typologically diverse languages (e.g., arnon, 2010; courtney, 2006; ozeki & shirai, 2010) to ascertain both the universal and specific aspects of language acquisition.