Morphological processing in heritage speakers
- 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 forPrevious 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.…
| Author details: | Serkan UygunORCiD, Harald ClahsenORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000577 |
| ISSN: | 1366-7289 |
| ISSN: | 1469-1841 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Bilingualism : language and cognition |
| Subtitle (English): | a masked priming study on the Turkish aorist |
| Publisher: | Cambridge Univ. Press |
| Place of publishing: | Cambridge |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2021/05/01 |
| Publication year: | 2021 |
| Release date: | 2022/11/28 |
| Tag: | Turkish; aorist; morphology; priming; processing; variability |
| Volume: | 24 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Article number: | PII S1366728920000577 |
| Number of pages: | 12 |
| First page: | 415 |
| Last Page: | 426 |
| Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)German Research Foundation (DFG) [317633480 - SFB 1287] |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
| DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
| 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache | |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
| License (German): |  CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
