Preserved morphological processing in heritage speakers: A masked priming study on Turkish

Abstract

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.

Morphological processing in heritage speakers: A masked priming study on the Turkish aorist

“…For our HS group, we obtained a semantic priming effect whereas Jacob et al (2019) did not for their HS group; Jacob and Kırkıcı (2016) did not have a semantic condition in their study. We believe this discrepancy between our results and those of Jacob et al (2019) is due to differences in the experimental materials of the two studies. Perea and Rosa (2002) reported that word pairs which are truly semantically related through antonymy/synonymy yield significantly higher semantic relatedness scores than word pairs that are just associated in meaning.…”

“…For the non-heritage CTR group we found morphological priming effects that are clearly dissociable from facilitation due to orthographic or semantic prime-target overlap, which is in line with the results of many previous masked-priming studies with L1 speakers of different languages (Marslen-Wilson, 2007). For Turkish HS, there are two previous masked-priming studies (Jacob & Kırkıcı, 2016;Jacob et al, 2019) to which we can compare our findings. One outcome that has been obtained in the two previous studies as well as in our study is the significant priming effect for regularly inflected word forms.…”

“…Gor et al (2019) reported results from a cross-modal priming experiment that yielded differences between default and oblique case markings in heritage speakers of Russian, significant priming effects for the (default) nominative case of Russian, but no effect for two of the oblique cases (genitive, instrumental). For Turkish, both Jacob and Kırkıcı (2016) and Jacob et al (2019) found reliable masked priming effects for regular verb forms in heritage speakers and non-heritage L1 controls. However, while Jacob and Kırkıcı (2016) additionally obtained significant orthographic priming for the heritage speaker group only, there was no such effect in Jacob et al's (2019) study, in either participant group.…”

“…For Turkish, both Jacob and Kırkıcı (2016) and Jacob et al (2019) found reliable masked priming effects for regular verb forms in heritage speakers and non-heritage L1 controls. However, while Jacob and Kırkıcı (2016) additionally obtained significant orthographic priming for the heritage speaker group only, there was no such effect in Jacob et al's (2019) study, in either participant group. It is hard to draw any strong conclusions from the results of these studies.…”

“…There are (to our knowledge) only four experimental studies that explore morphological processing in heritage speakers, two on Russian (Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor, Chrabaszcz & Cook, 2019) and two on Turkish (Jacob & Kırkıcı, 2016; Jacob, Şafak, Demir & Kırkıcı, 2019). The results from these studies are mixed and do not yield a clear picture.…”