We investigated the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Turkish-German bilinguals using two tasks. The first task elicited speeded judgments to verb number violations in sentences that contained plural genitive modifiers. We addressed whether these modifiers elicited attraction errors, which have supported the use of a memory retrieval mechanism in monolingual comprehension studies. The second task examined the comprehension of a language-specific constraint of Turkish against plural-marked verbs with overt plural subjects. Bilinguals showed a reduced application of this constraint, as compared to Turkish monolinguals. Critically, both groups showed similar rates of attraction, but the bilingual group accepted ungrammatical sentences more often. We propose that the similarity in attraction rates supports the use of the same retrieval mechanism, but that bilinguals have more problems than monolinguals in the mapping of morphological to abstract agreement features during speeded comprehension, which results in increased acceptability of ungrammatical sentences.
Although reproducibility of ABI values was found satisfactory, up to 12% of participants displayed more than 0.15 alternations between measurements, either on the same day or more than a week apart.
In a masked morphological priming experiment, we compared the processing of derived and inflected morphologically complex Turkish words in heritage speakers of Turkish living in Berlin and in native speakers of Turkish raised and living in Turkey. The results show significant derivational and inflectional priming effects of a similar magnitude in the heritage group and the control group. For both participant groups, semantic and orthographic control conditions indicate that these priming effects are genuinely morphological in nature, and cannot be due to semantic or orthographic similarity between prime and target. These results suggest that morphological processing in heritage speakers is based on the same fundamental processing mechanisms as in prototypical native speakers. We conclude that heritage speakers, despite the fact that they have acquired the language in a particular setting and were exposed to a relatively limited amount of input, can nevertheless develop native-like processing mechanisms for complex words.
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 isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants' reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.
The aim of this research was to gather preliminary data about the potential inhibitory effects of commercial diets on the protease activities of meagre larvae using in vitro techniques. Four commercial diets (Gemma Micro 150 (100-200 µm), Caviar (200-300 µm), Caviar (300-500 µm) and Perla Larva Proactive 4.0 (300-500 µm)) were tested in this study. The differences in the protease activities of meagre larvae during the sampling period were statistically significant (p < .05). The highest and lowest protease activities of meagre larvae were 393.97 ± 7.9 U/mg protein (7 DAH) and 9.64 ± 1.25 U/ mg protein (20 DAH), respectively. The digestive proteases of meagre larvae showed the greatest sensitivity to protease inhibitors present in Gemma Micro 150 (100-200 µm). In conclusion, Caviar (200-300 µm), Caviar (300-500 µm) and Perla Larva Proactive 4.0 (300-500 µm) are moderately advisable as the commercial diets in the feeding protocol of meagre larvae from 15 to 32 DAH except for more than 50% inhibitions, but not Gemma Micro 150 (100-200 µm).
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