Articles in Turkish/English interlanguage revisited: Implications of vowel harmony

Abstract

and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. Special thanks to Ays7 e Gürel for organizing the testing in Turkey. This research was funded by grants from SSHRCC and FQRSC. 1 There is some dispute about the status of unstressed bir. Kornfilt (1997) considers it to be an article, while Underhill (1976) treats it is a numeral. Lyons (1999) refers to it as a 'quasi indefinite article', but argues that definiteness is not grammaticalized in Turkish (see also Öztürk 2005). 2 Although [È] is the symbol typically used to represent the high back unrounded vowel in the literature on Turkish, we have chosen to use [¨] instead, as the central-back distinction becomes relevant in the manifestation of harmony in the L2 (see section 5).

Emergent knowledge of a universal phonological principle in the L2 acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish: A ‘four’-fold poverty of the stimulus in L2 acquisition

“…In fact, comparing previous research on UG principles in L2 phonology vs. L2 syntax, and pointing out the relatively little work in this area by L2 phonologists, Young-Scholten (1995, 1996) argued that there is, nevertheless, reason to believe that interlanguage phonologies do not violate the principles of UG, because they often correspond to natural languages (a point first made by Eckman, 1981), and because learners can often reset phonological parameters, instead of being stuck with the L1 values. Most of the findings on successful parameter resetting in L2 phonologies also came from syllabification (see, for example, Broselow and Finer, 1991; Young-Scholten, 1992, 1994), and, not surprisingly, some from stress and prosody (Archibald, 1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1998; Goad and White, 2004, 2006, 2009; Pater, 1993, 1997), both suprasegmental phenomena, as mentioned above. The question of this latter body of research was, of course, whether L2 learners can successfully reset phonological parameters, and not whether their interlanguages are constrained by the ‘principles’ of UG.…”

“…Nevertheless, very little research has been devoted to L2 acquisition of vowel harmony, even for purely descriptive purposes, let alone for the purpose of investigating whether L2 phonologies are constrained by UG. Of the few L2 studies that have looked at vowel harmony, some have done so indirectly in investigating another phenomenon, such as Goad and White’s (2009) use of vowel harmony data in making conclusions about L2 prosodic representations, while others have done so in the context of artificial languages, such as Finley’s (2012a, 2012b) creation of an artificial grammar with rounding vowel harmony and her related attempt to answer whether positive or negative evidence is more effective in the acquisition of such a system (see also Altan, 2011; Pycha et al, 2003). To our knowledge, only Altan (2012) has so far investigated the L2 acquisition of (Turkish) vowel harmony with actual language learners; see also McLaughlin et al (2010), who discuss some L2 acquisition of Finnish data, with event-related potentials (ERPs) comparing learners’ brain responses to vowel harmonic and nonharmonic stimuli, although the article they ascribe their data to (Pitkänen et al 2010) appears to be unpublished.…”

Prosodic faithfulness to foot edges: the case of Turkish stress

“…This is despite the fact that there is other evidence that the domain of vowel harmony in Turkish is the PWd, rather than the Phonological Phrase, for example : as Kabak & Vogel note, the second member of a compound or an adjective+noun sequence such as (45) does not harmonise with the first member. The presence of vowel harmony in (44), as opposed to (45), seems to indicate, then, that all suffixes in (44), including those that are prestressing, are within the PWd (see also Goad & White 2009).…”

Ultimate attainment of second language articles: A case study of an endstate second language Turkish-English speaker

“…Specifically, learners omit articles when the L1 prosodic structure cannot be used to represent articles and other functional morphemes in the L2. This position is known as the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) (Goad et al, 2003;Goad and White, 2006b, 2007, 2009a, 2009b. White (2003) collected naturalistic longitudinal data from a native speaker of Turkish, named SD, who is an advanced learner of English currently residing in Canada.…”

“…What we hope to achieve from our analysis is a more detailed account of article suppliance by an endstate speaker of English. To our knowledge, no other study in the L2 literature has provided a detailed phonetic analysis of articles, apart from Goad and White (2009b), where they analyse vowel harmony in Turkish. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the interlanguage representation of English articles and suggest how our findings support the strong version of the PTH.…”