Home > Events > Dissertation defense: Nur Basak Karatas (SLA)

Dissertation defense: Nur Basak Karatas (SLA)

Time: 
Wednesday, May 08, 2019 - 11:00 AM
Location: 
St. Mary's Multipurpose Room (STM 0105)

The Comparison of L1 and L2 Case Processing: ERP Evidence from Turkish

Abstract: Case-marking is a morphosyntactic feature that has frequently been shown to pose a major challenge to late second language (L2) learners even when they attain near-native proficiency. Yet, it has barely received attention even in first language (L1) processing literature, probably because the inflectional paradigm for case is absent in many Indo-European languages spoken today. However, case morphology is a linguistic means of argument marking commonly found among head-final languages like Turkish, and indeed, processing case markers correctly is crucial to determine syntactic function and semantic roles of the arguments in a verb-final sentence. Building on the findings of our previous self-paced reading task, the current study aims to gain more insight into the locus of case processing difficulties in L1 and L2 Turkish both at the single word recognition level (first experiment: lexical decision task) and sentence processing level (second experiment: grammaticality judgment task) through behavioral and electrophysiological responses. It further relates these processing costs to certain comparisons, such as structural (genitive, accusative) vs. lexical (dative) object case, argument (accusative, dative) vs. non-argument (genitive), higher (genitive) vs. lower type frequency (accusative, dative), citation form (nominative) vs. oblique cases (genitive, accusative, dative). In addition, the second experiment investigates the morphosyntactic processing of case violations (i.e., substitution of the accusative for the dative on the object or vice versa) across native speakers and advanced L2 learners of Turkish. To the best of our knowledge, the present work is the first ERP study to compare L1 and L2 morphological and morphosyntactic processing patterns of different case markings in an agglutinating language such as Turkish.       

Dissertation Committee Members:

Dr. Kira Gor (Chair, SLA)
Dr. Ellen Lau (LING)
Dr. Steven J. Ross (SLA)
Dr. Scott Jackson (Special Member)
Dr. Donald Bolger (Dean's Representative, HDQM)