TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jacob, Gunnar
A1  - Kirkici, Bilal
T1  - The processing of morphologically complex words in a specific speaker group A masked-priming study with Turkish heritage speakers
JF  - The mental lexicon
N2  - 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 Kırkıcı 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. ‘sağlık-sağ’ 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.
KW  - heritage speakers
KW  - complex words
KW  - morphological decomposition
KW  - masked priming
KW  - Turkish
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.2.06jac
SN  - 1871-1340
SN  - 1871-1375
VL  - 11
SP  - 308
EP  - 328
PB  - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -