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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.
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.
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.