LangSci Lunch Talk: Nur Basak Karatas (SLA)
Food and ideas bring people together. Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.
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The Comparison of L1 and L2 Turkish Case Processing Patterns across Sentence Comprehension and Production
Within the realm of the major question of to what extent and under what circumstances late second language (L2) learners can become native-like, a fairly uncontested finding is that L2 inflection is persistently hard to acquire. L2 learners have frequently been reported to omit inflectional morphemes, or to use them in an unsystematic way (see White, 2003, for a detailed review). Different approaches have attempted to account for this inconsistency through different names, such as general cognitive processing difficulties (e.g., low L2 working memory capacity, poor decoding, and insufficient processing speed, see McDonald, 2006). incomplete grammars (Johnson, Shenkman, Newport, and Medin, 1996), different real- time processing characteristics (Jiang, 2004) or representational differences as employed by different grammatical formats (Bley-Vroman, 1990), different memory systems (Ullman, 2005), or simply underuse of morphosyntactic information in L2 sentence comprehension (Silva & Clahsen, 2008). Consequently, late learners are less sensitive to erroneous default forms (Renaud, 2012), and make predictions in sentence processing to a lesser degree, irrespective of whether lexical or morphosyntactic information cues the prediction (Hopp, 2016). As elucidated by previous literature, some morphosyntactic features, such as case marking, may be more likely to yield difficulties in L2 processing. Yet, most of the evidence to date comes from the processing of case morphology in ambiguous sentences. To this end, the current study seeks to explore the potential differences between L1 and L2 Turkish case processing across sentence comprehension and production. By exploiting self-paced reading, production task and grammaticality judgment tests, the study looks into the effects of violation type (omission vs. substitution) across case markers (genitive, accusative and dative) on native and nonnative speakers’ sensitivity to case anomalies.
