SFB1287_BO4_Morphological processing in heritage speakers: A masked priming study on Turkish aorist

Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 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.

先前的研究表明，遗产语者（继承者语者）在屈折形态学方面存在困难。在本研究中，我们对97名双语（土耳其语/德语）遗产语者和40名土耳其语非遗产语者控制组进行了掩码启动实验，考察了土耳其语现在时态的规则和 irregular forms。我们发现，对于规则现在时态，遗产语者与控制组语者采用了相同的形态分解机制（‘词缀剥离’），而对于不规则屈折形式的处理，他们表现出了更大的变异性（即，表现不够一致）比控制组。遗产语者还展示了语义启动效应。从更广泛的角度来看，这些结果表明，遗产语者在识别形态学复杂的词语时，会借鉴多种信息来源。