Morphological processing in heritage speakers: A masked priming study on the Turkish aorist

Autor: Serkan Uygun, Harald Clahsen
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 24:415-426
ISSN: 1469-1841
1366-7289
DOI: 10.1017/s1366728920000577
Popis: 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 for recognizing morphologically complex words.
Databáze: OpenAIRE