26.2964, Diss: English, Turkish; Applied Ling, Lang Acq, Psycholing: Fatih Bayram: 'Acquisition of Turkish by Heritage Speakers: A Processability Approach'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-2964. Mon Jun 22 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.2964, Diss: English, Turkish; Applied Ling, Lang Acq, Psycholing: Fatih Bayram: 'Acquisition of Turkish by Heritage Speakers: A Processability Approach'

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Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 12:05:36
From: Fatih Bayram [fthbyrm at gmail.com]
Subject: Acquisition of Turkish by Heritage Speakers: A Processability Approach

 Institution: Newcastle University 
Program: School of Education Communication & Language Sciences 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2013 

Author: Fatih Bayram

Dissertation Title: Acquisition of Turkish by Heritage Speakers: A Processability Approach 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Psycholinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Turkish (tur)


Dissertation Director(s):
Clare Wright
Manfred Pienemann

Dissertation Abstract:

This study presents the findings of cross-sectional psycholinguistic research investigating the first-language acquisition of Turkish among heritage speakers in Germany. Studies in heritage language acquisition in the last
decades have provided increasing evidence that heritage speakers do not always converge on the grammars of native speakers, which is predominantly explained in relation to estimates of reduced input and output conditions. Nonetheless, Montrul (2010) underlines the fact that estimates cannot be used as measurements and addresses the need for a well-established theoretical framework that will account for the development of heritage speakers’ linguistic system to explain why heritage speakers succeed - or fail - in language acquisition in the ways that they do. This study aims to fill this gap by looking at the phenomena from a developmental perspective within the formalisms of Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998, 2005), a well-established cross-linguistic approach to acquisition based on the architecture of the human language processor, but which has not previously been applied to Turkish. This study investigated the grammatical competence of twenty-four young heritage speakers of
  Turkish in Germany by testing their online processing of various Turkish grammatical structures, focusing on passives and subject relative clauses. The results demonstrate that the language acquisition of Turkish heritage speakers is developmentally constrained by
availability of processing mechanisms. The participants displayed a clear hierarchy in their development, with competence in the processing of basic grammatical structures that are canonically mapped, but with gaps in the processing of complex structures such as passives and subject relative clauses that are non-canonically mapped and involve long-distance dependencies. This study thus contributes important insights both to theoretical accounts of
acquisition of Turkish, and to the wider study of heritage language acquisition.



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