Processing pro-drop features in heritage Turkish

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Serkan Uygun¹ 

[1] Faculty of Educational Sciences, Department of English Language Teaching, Bahçeşehir University

关键词: Turkish;    pro-drop;    subject-verb agreement;    sentence processing;    Syntactic knowledge;    discourse/pragmatic knowledge;    Heritage speakers;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.988550

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Previous studies have reported that null subject is not completely lost in heritage speakers, but there is an increase in the production and acceptance of overt subjects. Turkish is a pro-drop language and as a typical feature of pro-drop languages, it requires obligatory verb agreement marking for sentences with null subjects. However, Turkish subject-verb agreement marking is an example of optional agreement in which the 3rd person plural subject has optionality and can be used with singular verb forms under certain conditions. The current study investigates the processing of 3rd person plural overt and null subjects in heritage speakers during real time sentence processing by exploring their reading times for plural-marked and unmarked verbs in comparison to non-heritage speakers of Turkish via a self-paced reading experiment. Significant differences were observed between the heritage and non-heritage speakers of Turkish indicating obvious real-time processing differences between the two groups. These differences suggest that Turkish heritage speakers need more time to integrate the information in real time processing.

【 授权许可】

CC BY