Processing grammatical evidentiality and time reference in Turkish heritage and monolingual speakers

Abstract

In the current study, we examined how adult heritage and monolingual speakers of Turkish process evidentiality (the linguistic expression of information source) through finite verb inflections and time reference, expressed on non-finite participles. A sentence-verification task was used to measure participants’ sensitivity to evidentiality and time-reference violations in Turkish. Our findings showed that the heritage speakers were less accurate and slower than the monolinguals in responding to both evidentiality and time-reference violations. Also, the heritage speakers made more errors and had longer RTs when responding to evidentiality violations as compared to time-reference violations. The monolinguals had longer RTs (and more accurate responses) to time reference than to evidentiality violations. This study shows that evidentiality is susceptible to incomplete acquisition in Turkish heritage speakers. It is suggested that the requirement for simultaneous processing at different linguistic levels makes the evidentiality markers vulnerable.

Straight from the horse's mouth: agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors

“…By contrast, bilingual speakers judged unmarked and plural verbs as similarly acceptable, showing a reduced UNP (Bamyacı, 2016). As the UNP is influenced by semantic and pragmatic factors, these results support previous claims that bilinguals' morphosyntactic performance may be non-native-like when it relies on semantic/pragmatic distinctions Sorace, 2004;Arslan et al, 2015). However, this contrast should be treated as quantitative rather than qualitative, because both monolinguals and bilinguals accepted plural subjects with unmarked verbs to a very large extent.…”

“…Based on Bamyacı's results, and together with previous reports that bilinguals sometimes show non-native morphosyntactic performance when it relies on semantic/pragmatic distinctions Sorace, 2004;Arslan, de Kok, & Bastiaanse, 2015), we expected Turkish-German bilinguals to show a reduced UNP in comprehension and to be less accepting of unmarked verbs with plural subjects, as compared to monolinguals. Thus, the data gathered in the UNP task allowed us to assess whether potential group differences in the attraction task were due to problems with subject-verb agreement in the bilingual group, i.e., to differences in the degree to which the two groups disliked plural-marked verbs.…”

First Language Attrition as a Function of Age at Onset of Bilingualism: First Language Attainment of Turkish–English Bilinguals in the United Kingdom

“…Carrying out this investigation in Turkish was particularly relevant because Turkish has a variety of structures (e.g., complex morphology) that have previously been shown to be potential loci for erosion and age effects in other languages. Moreover, although previous findings pointed to a deterioration in the knowledge and use of Turkish spoken in Europe across generations (Arslan, De Kok, & Bastiaanse, ; Gürel & Yılmaz, ; Huls & van de Mond, ; Onar Valk & Backus, ; Yılmaz, ), we know very little about the role played by age at onset in this; this role can only be revealed by looking at the age‐at‐onset effect in similar features/properties previously shown to be eroded.…”

The Roles of Age, Attitude, and Use in First Language Development and Attrition of Turkish–English Bilinguals

“…Despite a tendency across such Turkish communities to remain loyal to their language and culture and a high level of endogamy (e.g., Backus, ), linguistic changes have been observed in a range of studies. These changes may affect all areas of the language, from accentedness (Karayayla & Schmid, ; Stangen, Kupisch, Proietti Ergün, & Zielke, ) through grammatical (e.g., Gürel, ; Onar Valk & Backus, ; Yağmur, ; Yılmaz, ), morphological (Arslan, De Kok, & Bastiaanse, ; Karayayla, in press; Pfaff, ), and lexical (Backus, ; Karayayla, 2018; Treffers‐Daller, Daller, Furman, & Rothman, ; Yılmaz & Schmid, ) complexity and sophistication.…”

“…Language Learning 70:S1, March 2020, pp. 54-84 accentedness (Karayayla & Schmid, 2019;Stangen, Kupisch, Proietti Ergün, & Zielke, 2015) through grammatical (e.g., Gürel, 2004;Onar Valk & Backus, 2013;Yagmur, 1997;Yılmaz, 2011), morphological (Arslan, De Kok, & Bastiaanse, 2015;Karayayla, in press;Pfaff, 1993), and lexical (Backus, 2012;Karayayla, 2018;Treffers-Daller, Daller, Furman, & Rothman, 2016;Yılmaz & Schmid, 2012) complexity and sophistication.…”