@article{OezkanFikriKırkıcıetal.2020, author = {{\"O}zkan, Ay{\c{s}}eg{\"u}l and Fikri, Figen Beken and K{\i}rk{\i}c{\i}, Bilal and Kliegl, Reinhold and Acart{\"u}rk, Cengiz}, title = {Eye movement control in Turkish sentence reading}, series = {Quarterly journal of experimental psychology : QJEP / EPS, Experimental Psychology Society}, volume = {74}, journal = {Quarterly journal of experimental psychology : QJEP / EPS, Experimental Psychology Society}, number = {2}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {London}, issn = {1747-0218}, doi = {10.1177/1747021820963310}, pages = {377 -- 397}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Reading requires the assembly of cognitive processes across a wide spectrum from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. One approach of unravelling the dynamics associated with these processes is to determine how eye movements are influenced by the characteristics of the text, in particular which features of the words within the perceptual span maximise the information intake due to foveal, spillover, parafoveal, and predictive processing. One way to test the generalisability of current proposals of such distributed processing is to examine them across different languages. For Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography-phonology mapping, we replicate the well-known canonical main effects of frequency and predictability of the fixated word as well as effects of incoming saccade amplitude and fixation location within the word on single-fixation durations with data from 35 adults reading 120 nine-word sentences. Evidence for previously reported effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions was mixed. There was no evidence for the expected Turkish-specific morphological effect of the number of inflectional suffixes on single-fixation durations. To control for word-selection bias associated with single-fixation durations, we also tested effects on word skipping, single-fixation, and multiple-fixation cases with a base-line category logit model, assuming an increase of difficulty for an increase in the number of fixations. With this model, significant effects of word characteristics and number of inflectional suffixes of foveal word on probabilities of the number of fixations were observed, while the effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions were mixed.}, language = {en} } @article{UygunClahsen2021, author = {Uygun, Serkan and Clahsen, Harald}, title = {Morphological processing in heritage speakers}, series = {Bilingualism : language and cognition}, volume = {24}, journal = {Bilingualism : language and cognition}, number = {3}, publisher = {Cambridge Univ. Press}, address = {Cambridge}, issn = {1366-7289}, doi = {10.1017/S1366728920000577}, pages = {415 -- 426}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.}, language = {en} } @book{SchroederSchellhardtAkincietal.2015, author = {Schroeder, Christoph and Schellhardt, Christin and Akinci, Mehmet-Ali and Dollnick, Meral and Dux, Ginesa and G{\"u}lbeyaz, Esin I{\c{s}}{\i}l and J{\"a}hnert, Anne and Ko{\c{c}}-G{\"u}lt{\"u}rk, Ceren and K{\"u}hmstedt, Patrick and Kuhn, Florian and Mezger, Verena and Pfaff, Carol and {\"U}rkmez, Bet{\"u}l Sena}, title = {MULTILIT}, editor = {Schroeder, Christoph and Schellhardt, Christin}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-80390}, publisher = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2015}, abstract = {This paper presents an overview of the linguistic analyses developed in the MULTILIT project and the processing of the oral and written texts collected. The project investigates the language abilities of multilingual children and adolescents, in particular, those who have Turkish and/or Kurdish as a mother tongue. A further aim of the project is to examine from a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective the extent to which competence in academic registers is achieved on the basis of the languages spoken by the children, including the language(s) spoken at the home, the language of the country of residence and the first foreign language. To be able to examine these questions using corpus linguistic parameters, we created categories of analysis in MULTILIT. The data collection comprises texts from bilingual and monolingual children and adolescents in Germany in their first language Turkish, their second language German und their foreign language English. Pupils aged between nine and twenty years of age produced monologue oral and written texts in the two genres of narrative and discursive. On the basis of these samples, we examine linguistic features such as lexical expression (lexical density, lexical diversity), syntactic complexity (syntactic and discursive packaging) as well as phonology in the oral texts and orthography in the written texts, with the aim of investigating the pupils' growing mastery of these features in academic and informal registers. To this end the raw data have been transcribed by the use of transcription conventions developed especially for the needs of the MULTILIT data. They are based on the commonly used HIAT and GAT transcription conventions and supplemented with conventions that provide additional information such as features at the graphic level. The categories of analysis comprise a large number of linguistic categories such as word classes, syntax, noun phrase complexity, complex verbal morphology, direct speech and text structures. We also annotate errors and norm deviations at a wide range of levels (orthographic, morphological, lexical, syntactic and textual). In view of the different language systems, these criteria are considered separately for all languages investigated in the project.}, language = {en} } @article{Schroeder2020, author = {Schroeder, Christoph}, title = {The advanced acquisition of orthography in heritage Turkish in Germany}, series = {Written language \& literacy}, volume = {23}, journal = {Written language \& literacy}, number = {2}, publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.}, address = {Amsterdam}, issn = {1387-6732}, doi = {10.1075/wll.00043.sch}, pages = {251 -- 271}, year = {2020}, abstract = {The paper investigates Turkish texts from heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany in a pseudo-longitudinal setting, looking at pupils' texts from the 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th grades. Two types of dynamics are identified in the advanced acquisition(1) of Turkish orthography in the heritage context. One is the dynamic of language contact, where in certain areas of the orthography, we find a re-interpretation of Turkish principles according to the German model. However, this changes as the pupils grow up. The second dynamic is the heritage situation. The heritage situation on one side leads to the establishment of new practices, and it also leads to a higher degree of variability of spelling solutions in those areas, where the orthographic system of Turkish poses challenges to every writer, whether monolingual and growing up in Turkey or heritage speaker.}, language = {en} } @article{Schroeder2014, author = {Schroeder, Christoph}, title = {Turkish texts of Turkish-German bilingual pupils in Germany}, series = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik}, volume = {44}, journal = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik}, number = {174}, publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam}, address = {Stuttgart}, issn = {0049-8653}, pages = {24 -- 43}, year = {2014}, abstract = {This article examines and discusses aspects of the acquisition of Turkish literacy in the minority context in Germany. After describing the particular sociolinguistic and language contact situation of Turkish in Germany, the article focuses on two empirical aspects of the acquisition of Turkish literacy within this situation. First, the development of noun phrase complexity is analyzed in a pseudo-longitudinal approach investigating Turkish texts of German-Turkish bilingual pupils of different grades. Second, strategies of literacy are analyzed in the investigation of Turkish texts from bilingual high school pupils of the 12th grade.}, language = {de} } @article{LagoHuvelleGracaninYuksekSafaketal.2018, author = {Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol and Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina and Safak, Duygu Fatma and Demir, Orhan and Kirkici, Bilal and Felser, Claudia}, title = {Straight from the horse's mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors}, series = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism}, volume = {9}, journal = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism}, number = {3}, publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.}, address = {Amsterdam}, issn = {1879-9264}, doi = {10.1075/lab.17019.lag}, pages = {398 -- 426}, year = {2018}, abstract = {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.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Kuehn2016, author = {K{\"u}hn, Jane}, title = {Functionally-driven language change}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-42207}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-422079}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {369}, year = {2016}, abstract = {Since the 1960ies, Germany has been host to a large Turkish immigrant community. While migrant communities often shift to the majority language over the course of time, Turkish is a very vital minority language in Germany and bilingualism in this community is an obvious fact which has been subject to several studies. The main focus usually is on German, the second language (L2) of these speakers (e.g. Hinnenkamp 2000, Keim 2001, Auer 2003, Cindark \& Aslan (2004), Kern \& Selting 2006, Selting 2009, Kern 2013). Research on the Turkish spoken by Turkish bilinguals has also attracted attention although to a lesser extend mainly in the framework of so called heritage language research (cf. Polinski 2011). Bilingual Turkish has been investigated under the perspective of code-switching and codemixing (e.g. Kallmeyer \& Keim 2003, Keim 2003, 2004, Keim \& Cindark 2003, Hinnenkamp 2003, 2005, 2008, Dirim \& Auer 2004), and with respect to changes in the morphologic, the syntactic and the orthographic system (e.g. Rehbein \& Karako{\c{c}} 2004, Schroeder 2007). Attention to the changes in the prosodic system of bilingual Turkish on the other side has been exceptional so far (Queen 2001, 2006). With the present dissertation, I provide a study on contact induced linguistic changes on the prosodic level in the Turkish heritage language of adult early German-Turkish bilinguals. It describes structural changes in the L1 Turkish intonation of yes/no questions of a representative sample of bilingual Turkish speakers. All speakers share a similar sociolinguistic background. All acquired Turkish as their first language from their families and the majority language German as an early L2 at latest in the kinder garden by the age of 3. A study of changes in bilingual varieties requires a previous cross-linguistic comparison of both of the involved languages in language contact in order to draw conclusions on the contact-induced language change in delimitation to language-internal development. While German is one of the best investigated languages with respect to its prosodic system, research on Turkish intonational phonology is not as progressed. To this effect, the analysis of bilingual Turkish, as elicited for the present dissertation, is preceded by an experimental study on monolingual Turkish. In this regard an additional experiment with 11 monolingual university students of non-linguistic subjects was conducted at the Ege University in Izmir in 2013. On these grounds the present dissertation additionally contributes new insights with respect to Turkish intonational phonology and typology. The results of the contrastive analysis of German and Turkish bring to light that the prosodic systems of both languages differ with respect to the use of prosodic cues in the marking of information structure (IS) and sentence type. Whereas German distinguishes in the prosodic marking between explicit categories for focus and givenness, Turkish uses only one prosodic cue to mark IS. Furthermore it is shown that Turkish in contrast to German does not use a prosodic correlate to mark yes/no questions, but a morphological question marker. To elicit Turkish yes/no questions in a bilingual context which differ with respect to their information structure in a further step the methodology of Xu (1999) to elicit in-situ focus on different constituents was adapted in the experimental study. A data set of 400 Turkish yes/no questions of 20 bilingual Turkish speakers was compiled at the Zentrum f{\"u}r Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin and at the University of Potsdam in 2013. The prosodic structure of the yes/no questions was phonologically and phonetically analyzed with respect to changes in the f0 contour according to IS modifications and the use of prosodic cues to indicate sentence type. The results of the analyses contribute surprising observations to the research of bilingual prosody. Studies on bilingual language change and language acquisition have repeatedly shown that the use of prosodic features that are considered as marked by means of lower and implicational use across and within a language cause difficulties in language contact and second language acquisition. Especially, they are not expected to pass from one language to another through language contact. However, this structurally determined expectation on language development is refuted by the results of the present study. Functionally related prosody, such as the cues to indicate IS, are transferred from German L2 to the Turkish L1 of German-Turkish bilingual speakers. This astonishing observation provides the base for an approach to language change centered on functional motivation. Based on Matras' (2007, 2010) assumption of functionality in language change, Paradis' (1993, 2004, 2008) approach of Language Activation and the Subsystem Theory and the Theory of Language as a Dynamic System (Heredina \& Jessner 2002), it will be shown that prosodic features which are absent in one of the languages of bilingual speech communities are transferred from the respective language to the other when they contribute to the contextualization of a pragmatic concept which is not expressed by other linguistic means in the target language. To this effect language interaction is based on language activation and inhibition mechanisms dealing with differences in the implicit pragmatic knowledge between bilinguals and monolinguals. The motivator for this process of language change is the contextualization of the message itself and not the structure of the respective feature on the surface. It is shown that structural consideration may influence language change but that bilingual language change does not depend on structural restrictions nor does the structure cause a change. The conclusions drawn on the basis of empirical facts can especially contribute to a better understanding of the processes of bilingual language development as it combines methodologies and theoretical aspects of different linguistic subfields.}, language = {en} } @article{JacobSafakDemiretal.2018, author = {Jacob, Gunnar and Safak, Duygu Fatma and Demir, Orhan and Kirkici, Bilal}, title = {Preserved morphological processing in heritage speakers}, series = {Second language research}, volume = {35}, journal = {Second language research}, number = {2}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {London}, issn = {0267-6583}, doi = {10.1177/0267658318764535}, pages = {173 -- 194}, year = {2018}, 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.}, language = {en} } @article{JacobKirkici2016, author = {Jacob, Gunnar and Kirkici, Bilal}, title = {The processing of morphologically complex words in a specific speaker group A masked-priming study with Turkish heritage speakers}, series = {The mental lexicon}, volume = {11}, journal = {The mental lexicon}, publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.}, address = {Amsterdam}, issn = {1871-1340}, doi = {10.1075/ml.11.2.06jac}, pages = {308 -- 328}, year = {2016}, abstract = {The present study investigates to what extent morphological priming varies across different groups of native speakers of a language. In two masked-priming experiments, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex Turkish words in Turkish heritage speakers raised and living in Germany. Materials and experimental design were based on K\&\#305;rk\&\#305;c\&\#305; and Clahsen's (2013) study on morphological processing in Turkish native speakers and L2 learners, allowing for direct comparisons between the three groups. Experiment 1 investigated priming effects for morphologically related prime-target pairs. Heritage speakers showed a similar pattern of results as the L1 comparison group, with significant priming effects for prime-target pairs with inflected primes (e.g. 'sorar-sor' asks-ask) as well as for prime-target pairs with derived primes (e.g. 'sa\&\#287;l\&\#305;k-sa\&\#287;' health-healthy). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime-target pairs which were semantically and morphologically unrelated, but only related with regard to orthographic overlap (e.g. 'devre-dev' period-giant). Unlike both L1 speakers raised in Turkey and highly proficient L2 learners, heritage speakers also showed significant priming effects in this condition. Our results suggest that heritage speakers differ from both native speakers and L2 learners in that they rely more on (orthographic) surface form properties of the stimulus during early stages of word recognition, at the expense of morphological decomposition.}, language = {en} } @article{ClahsenRothweilerSterneretal.2014, author = {Clahsen, Harald and Rothweiler, Monika and Sterner, Franziska and Chilla, Solveig}, title = {Linguistic markers of specific language impairment in bilingual children: the case of verb morphology}, series = {Clinical linguistics \& phonetics}, volume = {28}, journal = {Clinical linguistics \& phonetics}, number = {9}, publisher = {Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {London}, issn = {0269-9206}, doi = {10.3109/02699206.2014.886726}, pages = {709 -- 721}, year = {2014}, language = {en} }