A Corpus-based Study on Turkish Spoken Productions of Bilingual Adults

Abstract

The current study investigated whether monolingual adult speakers of Turkish and bilingual adult speakers of Arabic and Turkish significantly differ regarding their spoken productions in Turkish. Accordingly, two groups of undergraduate students studying Turkish Language and Literature at a state university in Turkey were presented two videos on a computer screen, and asked to narrate each film in Turkish as completely as possible, which was videotaped by the researchers. Subsequently, two sets of corpora were compiled from the video transcriptions and analysed through a computer programme. The findings showed that the bilingual group does not significantly differ from the monolingual group in their choice of word order and voice, and that they overused the present progressive tense, and conversational fillers while narrating video-films as opposed to the monolingual group. It might be concluded that both languages are active in their mind, and that their lexical access to their L1 is slightly stronger than that to their L2. The study concludes with a few suggestions for further directions.