Processing of conditional constructions in Turkish l2 speakers of English

Download

index.pdf

Date

2019

Author

Evcen, Ebru

Metadata

Show full item record

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

Item Usage Stats

178
views

235
downloads

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, incongruent) as within-subjects and proficiency level (advanced, intermediate) as between-subjects factors. Results from the offline task revealed that Turkish L2 speakers were able to detect ungrammaticalities due to double negations (as in unless…not), and thus have a correct representation of unless. On the other hand, results from the SPR task showed that regardless of their proficiency levels, Turkish v L2 speakers failed to detect syntactic anomalies during online processing, and in fact, they tended to expect an overt negation following unless. In a similar vein, L2 speakers were able to integrate the context in their interpretation only in unless…not and if…not conditions (i.e., conditions in which their structural expectations are met). As for unless (i.e., grammatical but not expected), the integration of the contextual information was either delayed or prevented. To account for the findings in terms of L2 processing mechanisms, overall, we propose that on condition that L2 speakers’ structural expectations are fulfilled, the integration of higher-level sources such as discourse and pragmatics can be achieved. Crucially, the pattern was the same in native speakers. The observed pattern is discussed in terms of existing L2 processing accounts.

Subject Keywords

Grammar, Comparative and general, Grammar, Comparative and general Conditionals., Keywords: L2 Sentence Processing, Conditional Constructions, Psycholinguistics, Incremental Processing.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12624144/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/44956

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, 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...
Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English Başer, Zeynep; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2018) 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 ...
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...
Testing the interface hypothesis: L2 acquisition of English subjects and articles by Turkish learners Geydir, Ecem; Sağın Şimşek, Sultan Çiğdem; Department of English Language Teaching (2020) This thesis aims to expand the testing grounds of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) by investigating the acquisition of English subjects operating with pure syntax and article uses of (in)definiteness and genericity in English governed with external and internal interfaces respectively by L1-Turkish learners. Fifty-eight sophomore students who have been studying in the Department of Foreign Language Education of a state university in central Turkey were asked to complete a Grammaticality Judgement, a Discourse ...
An Experimental study on acquisition of prepositions in English as a third language Çabuk, Sakine; Sağın Şimşek, Sultan Çiğdem; Gracanın Yüksek, Martına; Department of English Language Teaching (2016) This study explores the role of cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition process by examining English adpositions. Comprehension, processing and production of English prepositions (in, on, at, behind, over, to) were examined through off-line and on-line data collection tasks to find out which of the two known languages (L1 or L2) is the major source of cross-linguistic influence on the acquisition of English (L3) adpositions given the fact that adpositions are morphologically and syntactical...

Citation Formats

E. Evcen, “Processing of conditional constructions in Turkish l2 speakers of English,” Thesis (M.S.) -- Graduate School of Social Sciences. English Language Teaching., Middle East Technical University, 2019.