The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11655646
AutoresMartina Gračanin-Yuksek (0000-0002-2804-6022, Middle East Technical University, autor de correspondencia), Silvia Lago (0000-0002-4966-1913, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, Germany), Duygu F Şafak (0000-0002-3563-8851, Technische Universität Braunschweig), Orhan Demir (0000-0001-6351-463X, Middle East Technical University), Bilal Kırkıcı (0000-0002-6423-7774, Middle East Technical University)
Año2019
Volumen36
Número4
Páginas475-501
Fecha de publicación2019-04-22
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSecond language Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0267-6583 • E-ISSN: 1477-0326
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0267658319841403
OpenAlexW2940486301
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas66

Previous work has shown that heritage grammars are often simplified compared to their monolingual counterparts, especially in domains in which the societally-dominant language makes fewer distinctions than the heritage language. We investigated whether linguistic simplification extended to the anaphoric system of Turkish heritage speakers living in Germany. Whereas the Turkish monolingual grammar features a three-way distinction between reflexives ( kendi), pronouns ( o), and syntactically-unconstrained anaphors ( kendisi), German only distinguishes between two categories, pronouns and reflexives. We examined whether heritage speakers simplified the Turkish anaphor system by assimilating the syntactically unconstrained anaphor kendisi to either of the two categories attested in the societally-dominant language, German. Speakers’ sensitivity to grammatical distinctions in comprehension was assessed using an offline antecedent selection task and an online self-paced reading task. Our results showed that heritage speakers retain the three-way anaphoric distinctions of the monolingual grammar but there were also differences between the results of the offline and the online tasks. We suggest that processing paradigms are a useful complement to judgment tasks when studying how heritage speakers use grammatical distinctions involving optionality, as online measures can reveal distinctions that are allowed, even if dispreferred by comprehenders

Antecedent (behavioral psychology · German · Grammar · Heritage language · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Selection (genetic algorithm · Task (project management · Turkish · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Artificial Intelligence