Straight from the horse’s mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors
- 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 increasedWe 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.…
Author details: | Maria Sol Lago HuvelleORCiD, Martina Gracanin-Yuksek, Duygu Fatma Safak, Orhan Demir, Bilal Kirkici, Claudia FelserORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17019.lag |
ISSN: | 1879-9264 |
ISSN: | 1879-9272 |
Title of parent work (English): | Linguistic approaches to bilingualism |
Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing Co. |
Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2018/03/30 |
Publication year: | 2018 |
Release date: | 2021/05/14 |
Tag: | Turkish; agreement attraction; bilingualism |
Volume: | 9 |
Issue: | 3 |
Number of pages: | 29 |
First page: | 398 |
Last Page: | 426 |
Funding institution: | Alexander-von-Humboldt professorshipAlexander von Humboldt Foundation; TUBITAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of TurkeyTurkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [113K458] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |