TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jacob, Gunnar
A1  - Safak, Duygu Fatma
A1  - Demir, Orhan
A1  - Kirkici, Bilal
T1  - Preserved morphological processing in heritage speakers
BT  - a masked priming study on Turkish
JF  - Second language research
N2  - 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.
KW  - derivation
KW  - heritage speakers
KW  - inflection
KW  - morphological processing
KW  - Turkish
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658318764535
SN  - 0267-6583
SN  - 1477-0326
VL  - 35
IS  - 2
SP  - 173
EP  - 194
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol
A1  - Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina
A1  - Safak, Duygu Fatma
A1  - Demir, Orhan
A1  - Kirkici, Bilal
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Straight from the horse’s mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors
JF  - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism
N2  - 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.
KW  - agreement attraction
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - Turkish
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17019.lag
SN  - 1879-9264
SN  - 1879-9272
VL  - 9
IS  - 3
SP  - 398
EP  - 426
PB  - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -