The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers

Date

2019-01-01

Author

Gracanın Yüksek, Martına
Şafak, Duygu Fatma
Demir, Orhan
Kırkıcı, Bilal

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

261
views

0
downloads

Previous work has shown that heritage grammars are often simplified compared to their monolingual counterparts, especially in domains in which the societally-dominant language makes fewer distinctions than the heritage language. We investigated whether linguistic simplification extended to the anaphoric system of Turkish heritage speakers living in Germany. Whereas the Turkish monolingual grammar features a three-way distinction between reflexives (kendi), pronouns (o), and syntactically-unconstrained anaphors (kendisi), German only distinguishes between two categories, pronouns and reflexives. We examined whether heritage speakers simplified the Turkish anaphor system by assimilating the syntactically unconstrained anaphorkendisito either of the two categories attested in the societally-dominant language, German. Speakers' sensitivity to grammatical distinctions in comprehension was assessed using an offline antecedent selection task and an online self-paced reading task. Our results showed that heritage speakers retain the three-way anaphoric distinctions of the monolingual grammar but there were also differences between the results of the offline and the online tasks. We suggest that processing paradigms are a useful complement to judgment tasks when studying how heritage speakers use grammatical distinctions involving optionality, as online measures can reveal distinctions that are allowed, even if dispreferred by comprehenders.

Subject Keywords

Anaphors, German, Heritage language, Sentence processing, Turkish

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/33137

Journal

Second Language Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319841403

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The production and perception of Turkish evidentiality markers by Turkish-German returnees Kaya-Soykan, Didem; Antonova-Unlu, Elena; Sağın Şimşek, Sultan Çiğdem (2023-03-01) The study contributes to research on the development of the heritage language after return to the country of origin and examines whether the ultimate attainment of the heritage grammar after many years of residing in the country of origin brings returnees to a level compatible with that of monolinguals. We focus on the production and perception of evidentiality markers in the heritage Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals who returned to Turkey after finishing a German high school and have been residing in T...
The processing of morphologically complex words in a specific speaker group A masked-priming study with Turkish heritage speakers Jacob, Gunnar; Kırkıcı, Bilal (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016-01-01) The present study investigates to what extent morphological priming varies across different groups of native speakers of a language. In two masked-priming experiments, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex Turkish words in Turkish heritage speakers raised and living in Germany. Materials and experimental design were based on Kirkici and Clahsen's (2013) study on morphological processing in Turkish native speakers and L2 learners, allowing for direct comparisons between the three groups. E...
The Interaction of Contextual and Syntactic Information in the Processing of Turkish Anaphors Gracanın Yüksek, Martına; Safak, Duygu Fatma; Demir, Orhan; Kırkıcı, Bilal (2017-12-01) In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi. The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isol...
The processing of morphologically complex words by developing readers of Turkish: a masked priming study Oğuz, Enis; Kırkıcı, Bilal (2022-11-01) The processing of morphologically complex words has been studied in many languages, leading to a variety of theoretical accounts. Prime type, individual differences, and cross-linguistic effects have emerged as potential factors in morphological processing, but the findings so far have been inconclusive, especially for young children. This study investigated the early stages of morphological processing in Turkish-speaking children using the visual masked priming paradigm. We used different prime conditions ...
The influence of early monolingual dictionaries and word lists on the standardisation of English spelling Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M. (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2001-01-01) This paper aims to ascertain as precisely as possible what direct influence the early monolingual word lists and dictionaries may have had on the standardisation of English spelling. It is based upon research in which a quantitative analysis of the spellings of lemmas from the nine earliest published such lists and dictionaries was made and followed by a comparison of these lemmas and their spellings with the spellings from a manuscript and printed text of appropriate date. These word lists and dictionaries...

Citation Formats

M. Gracanın Yüksek, D. F. Şafak, O. Demir, and B. Kırkıcı, “The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers,” Second Language Research, pp. 0–0, 2019, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/33137.