Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English

Download

index.pdf

Date

2018

Author

Başer, Zeynep

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

403
views

242
downloads

The purpose of this study is to investigate the syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English with different levels of proficiency in English. Turkish and English belong to typologically different groups of languages. Within the scope of this study, we investigate syntactic priming of relative clause attachments, which enables us to examine and compare the strategies employed for ambiguity resolution both in Turkish and English. The data was collected through offline (pen-and-paper), online (self-paced reading), and eye-tracking studies. The analysis of the data revealed important findings about the parsing strategies employed by both monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English. The role of several confounding factors on RC attachment preferences was identified, such as the role of (i) animacy / inanimacy information embedded in the host NPs, (ii) semantic relations between the host NPs, (iii) the semantic associations of the host NPs with the proximal and the distal predicate, and (iv) active / passive RC condition. Furthermore, the relation between working memory capacity and RC attachment preferences was analysed. Overall, the results show that NP1 (high) attachment preference can be attributed to processing difficulty. Besides, effects of methodological issues, such as the presentation mode (i.e. full sentence or phrase-by-phrase), techniques (i.e. offline, online, or eye-tracking), task requirements (i.e. implicit processing or directed assessment of the syntactic structure in the prime) and modality(comprehension or production) were compared.

Subject Keywords

English language., Turkish language., Grammar, Comparative and general, Grammar, Comparative and general

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622043/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27252

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Morphological processing of inflected and derived words in L1 Turkish and L2 English Şafak, Duygu Fatma; Kırkıcı, Bilal; Department of English Language Teaching (2015) The present study aims at examining how inflected and derived words are processed during the early stages of visual word recognition in a native language (L1) and in a second language (L2). A second aim of the study is to find out whether or not the semantic and surface-form properties of morphologically complex words affect early word recognition processes. Two masked priming experiments were conducted to investigate morphological processing in L1 Turkish and in L2 English. In the first experiment, 40 L1 s...
The Second language processing of nominal compounds: a masked priming study Çelikkol Berk, Nurten; Kırkıcı, Bilal; Department of English Language Teaching (2018) The primary purpose of the present study was to understand the workings of the cognitive mechanisms underlying L2 morphological processing, and more particularly, to explore how noun-noun compounds in L2 English are processed by native speakers of Turkish in the earliest stages of word recognition. Furthermore, the study investigated the role of constituent morphemes in the processing of compound words and examined whether or not a compound word primes its first and second constituents equally. The final pu...
EFL learners’ use of path elements in motion event expressions : a study on Turkish university students İşler, Zeynep Nur; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of English Literature (2014) The study investigates spoken and written path of motion use of Turkish university level EFL learners at Pre-Intermediate and Upper Intermediate levels of proficiency. The aim of the study is to examine whether the Talmyan (1985) typology holds for EFL learners. This typology categorizes Turkish as a verb-framed language and English as a satellite-framed language. A written task and a spoken task are used. The results of the written production task supported the Talmyan typology: there was a significant lan...
Processing of conditional constructions in Turkish l2 speakers of English Evcen, Ebru; Özge, Duygu; Department of English Language Teaching (2019) This thesis aims to examine whether Turkish L2 learners of English process conditional constructions in an incremental and/or predictive manner. An offline grammaticality judgment (GJT) task was devised to test L2 learners’ sensitivity to grammatical violations and an online self-paced reading (SPR) task was designed to find out whether processing patterns of L2 learners would match existing L2 processing accounts. We manipulated the Connector Type (unless, unless…not, if…not) and Context Type (congruent, i...
Grammar and information : a study of Turkish indefinites Özge, Umut; Bozşahin, Hüseyin Cem; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2010) Turkish, along with many other languages, marks its direct objects in two distinct ways: overt accusative marking (Acc) versus no marking (∅). The research on the grammar and interpretation of Turkish indeﬁnite descriptions has focused on the effects of this distinc- tion in case-marking on the interpretation of indeﬁnite noun phrases. The overt accusative marker has been associated with discourse-linking (Nilsson 1985; Enç 1991; Zidani-Eroğlu 1997), speciﬁcity (von Heusinger 2002; von Heusinger and Kornﬁlt...

Citation Formats

Z. Başer, “Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2018.