Monolingual Turkish Research Articles

Turkish correlatives in monolingual Turkish and bilingual Turkish-German grammar

Our paper presents an experimental study on multiple correlatives in Turkish. The research questions that guided our study are twofold: (a) What are the presuppositions of multiple correlatives in Turkish? (b) Is there a difference between monolingual Turkish speakers and bilingual Turkish-German speakers with respect to multiple correlatives? Question (a) targets the presuppositions of interrogative-based correlatives. Since the presuppositions of multiple questions are crosslinguistically variable, are the presuppositions of correlatives based on them variable in a parallel way? Question (b) targets crosslinguistic variability in the acceptability of multiple correlatives. While Turkish permits them, German does not. Does this variability affect bilingual speakers’ grammars? Our results indicate that (a) multiple correlatives share the presuppositions of the questions they contain and (b) bilingual speakers’ grammar of correlatives is different from that of monolingual speakers. The paper sheds a new light on crosslinguistic variation in the domain of questions and correlatives and on bilingual grammar.

Pre-service Teachers' Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Teaching Refugee Background Students at Turkish Public Schools

<p style="text-align: justify;">The number of school-aged refugee background children on Turkish soil was estimated to be over 2 million in 2022. Acknowledging the importance of quality education for these children to achieve equity in Turkish-only public schools, this study examined pre-service teachers' self-efficacies in teaching refugee-background students (RBS). Data were collected from 437 pre-service teachers studying at eight different teacher education programs via the adopted Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and analyzed with the Tukey multiple comparison test. The findings revealed that pre-service teachers rated low self-efficacies in teaching the RBSs. A comparison of mean scores based on the programs indicated that pre-service teachers in the early education programs scored the lowest self-efficacy while the pre-service teachers in Physical Education programs scored the highest. Moreover, the self-efficacies of bilingual pre-service teachers differed significantly from monolingual Turkish proficient pre-service teachers implying a positive correlation between pre-service teachers’ self-efficacies and bi/multilingualism. Lastly, senior pre-service teachers rated higher self-efficacies than freshmen, junior, or sophomore pre-service teachers. The study implied a need for culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies and differentiated instruction in the teacher education curriculum to prepare pre-service teachers better for the RBSs in Turkish public schools.</p>

An Examination of Story Narration by Monolingual and Bilingual Turkish Children

In the present case study, we aimed to explore whether there were any differences between monolingual Turkish and Turkish-Italian bilingual children in terms of their use of language structures in Turkish while narrating a story from a picture book titled “Frog, where are you?” by Mayer (1969). Four monolingual Turkish and three Turkish-Italian bilingual children narrated the story. The data from the recordings indicated some differences in terms of preference for certain language features like tense differences in their story narration. While younger monolinguals reported the events in the story with past tense markers like –mIş and –Iyor, bilingual children displayed a marked tendency for the past tense –mIş marker. The older children in both groups chose to use the –Iyor marker used by monolingual teenagers and adults. We argued that such differences in preferences might indicate an effect of Italian, or the interlanguage varieties might be responsible for the discrepancies. Explanations as to why these differences might have occurred and some practical suggestions for educators are provided in the study.

Sign advantage: Both children and adults' spatial expressions in sign are more informative than those in speech and gestures combined.

Expressing Left-Right relations is challenging for speaking-children. Yet, this challenge was absent for signing-children, possibly due to iconicity in the visual-spatial modality of expression. We investigate whether there is also a modality advantage when speaking-children's co-speech gestures are considered. Eight-year-old child and adult hearing monolingual Turkish speakers and deaf signers of Turkish-Sign-Language described pictures of objects in various spatial relations. Descriptions were coded for informativeness in speech, sign, and speech-gesture combinations for encoding Left-Right relations. The use of co-speech gestures increased the informativeness of speakers' spatial expressions compared to speech-only. This pattern was more prominent for children than adults. However, signing-adults and children were more informative than child and adult speakers even when co-speech gestures were considered. Thus, both speaking- and signing-children benefit from iconic expressions in visual modality. Finally, in each modality, children were less informative than adults, pointing to the challenge of this spatial domain in development.

Acquiring French Intonation against the Backdrop of Heritage Bilingualism: The Case of German–Turkish Learners

This paper investigates the intonation of L3 French, produced by six bilingual learners (ages: 15–17) who speak Turkish as a heritage language (HL) along with German and six same-aged monolingual German learners. We examined of a corpus of read speech in two respects: first, we determined the number of accentual phrases (APs) and, second, we extracted F0 values for each segment, normalized them, and calculated the deviations from the average values produced by three native controls (age: 21–23). Although the bilinguals were expected to outperform the monolinguals due to certain similarities between the intonational systems of French and Turkish, their mean deviation from the native contours was only slightly smaller than that of the monolinguals (difference not significant). To determine how strongly the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation was influenced by German and whether it could serve as a basis for positive transfer whatsoever, we compared their production in Turkish with data recorded from three monolingual Turkish L1 speakers (ages: 21–32) and five German learners of L2 Turkish (ages: 22–43). Results show that the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation does not deviate substantially from the monolinguals’ one, in contrast to the contours produced by the L2 learners. This suggests that metalinguistic and prosodic awareness should be fostered in heritage bilinguals to make them benefit from their full linguistic repertoire.

Dynamic Acoustic Unit Augmentation with BPE-Dropout for Low-Resource End-to-End Speech Recognition.

With the rapid development of speech assistants, adapting server-intended automatic speech recognition (ASR) solutions to a direct device has become crucial. For on-device speech recognition tasks, researchers and industry prefer end-to-end ASR systems as they can be made resource-efficient while maintaining a higher quality compared to hybrid systems. However, building end-to-end models requires a significant amount of speech data. Personalization, which is mainly handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, is another challenging task associated with speech assistants. In this work, we consider building an effective end-to-end ASR system in low-resource setups with a high OOV rate, embodied in Babel Turkish and Babel Georgian tasks. We propose a method of dynamic acoustic unit augmentation based on the Byte Pair Encoding with dropout (BPE-dropout) technique. The method non-deterministically tokenizes utterances to extend the token’s contexts and to regularize their distribution for the model’s recognition of unseen words. It also reduces the need for optimal subword vocabulary size search. The technique provides a steady improvement in regular and personalized (OOV-oriented) speech recognition tasks (at least 6% relative word error rate (WER) and 25% relative F-score) at no additional computational cost. Owing to the BPE-dropout use, our monolingual Turkish Conformer has achieved a competitive result with 22.2% character error rate (CER) and 38.9% WER, which is close to the best published multilingual system.

Türkçede Bürünsel Odak İşlemleme: Elektrofizyolojik Bir Araştırma

Focused elements are generally marked with syntactic canonicity and prosody. Being a scrambled language, Turkish uses both syntactic and prosodic information to mark the focus. However, it does not allow for focus marking in post-verbal position. In this study, the neurophysiological processes of the focus in Turkish are examined by using prosodic and syntactic information. Recent psycholinguistics studies assume that there is an interaction between prosody and syntax through the focus in the online sentence comprehension process. Thirty participants (16 female and 14 male between the ages of 19 and 33), whose native language was Turkish and who spoke monolingual Turkish, and who did not have any neurological, hearing, or linguistic impairments, took part in the experiments measured with Electroencephalogram (EEG). Using an event-related potentials (ERPs) design, this study provides evidence for an interaction between prosody and syntax in Turkish. The experimental design of the study consisted of prosodic, syntactic, and prosodic-syntactic violations. Participants were asked to listen 300 auditory stimuli (100 filler sentences) including sentences with both congruent and incongruent focus. The stimuli consisted of 50 sentences for each experimental condition. All critical words occurred in the sentence-final positions. For the prosodic violation critical words were focused via incongruent focusing on post-verbal position, and for the syntactic violation critical words were manipulated with case marking manipulation (i.e., accusative case versus dative case violations). In addition, for the interaction of prosodic and syntactic violations, critical words were incongruent focused and incongruent case was marked. The results revealed that prosodic incongruity elicited a broadly distributed positivity in posterior regions (400-1200 ms) lateralized to the left hemisphere and a right anterior negativity (RAN) (300-500 ms) effect. Syntactic violations also indicated a distributed anterior negativity (300-500 ms) effect. Supportive evidence for the late interaction of prosodic and syntactic processing in the neural integration of positive 600 (P600) and Closure Positive Shift (CPS) was observed. The findings provide support for recent neurocognitive approaches for late interaction between prosody and syntax in the sentence-final position in Turkish sentences.

Is There a Particular RC Attachment Preference in Turkish? Negotiating the Effects of Semantic Factors.

The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]ˮ. The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment preferences-whether NP1 or NP2-vary across languages, which results in contradictory evidence if some universal processing principle is assumed. Turkish differs typologically from English and other European languages in the construction of RC using complex "genitive-possessor" construction. In order to make a valid cross-linguistic comparison it is therefore of particular importance to carefully control potential extraneous factors which might obstruct true attachment preferences-if they exist. The present study, which controls various confounding factors, reveals that both syntactic and non-syntactic factors should be taken into consideration when constructing the stimulus sentences for testing attachment ambiguity resolution. Specifically, we propose that the semantic relations (e.g. part-whole relations) between the noun phrases of the genitive-possessive construction and the semantic associations with the proximal as well as with the distal predicate play a key role in the attachment preferences of monolingual Turkish native speakers in this type of ambiguous sentences. When these extraneous factors were controlled, no preference was observed.

Evrensel bir çözümleyici ya da dile özgü çözümleme stratejileri: Türkçe’de ilgi tümcelerini isim tamlamalarında tamlayan ya da tamlanan ile bağlama tercihleri

This study investigated syntactic priming of
 relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in monolingual Turkish speakers
 through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RC attachment
 preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universal
 principles but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth
 their assumptions about the universality of the parser and the underlying
 mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and the sources of information used
 in sentence processing.  However, there
 is not one single model, the predictions of which could account for all the
 contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studies using different
 materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC
 attachment preferences further in detail, we conducted two offline
 (pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (self-paced reading) task. The results
 showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachment preferences on
 condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RC
 attachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic
 associations of the host NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task
 requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), and techniques (e.g. offline or
 online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic priming
 showed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical
 configuration of the alternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the
 results suggested that a tendency towards NP1 attachment preference might be
 attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimize cognitive
 demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs.
 passive), task requirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or
 directed attention vs. implicit processing).

Zafer Şenocak’s “Turkish Turn”

AbstractWhereas language constitutes one key vessel of historical remembering, the act of translation in Zafer Şenocak’s 2008 novel Köşk (The Pavilion) reveals how modern Turkish has also enabled historical forgetting, in its assertion of a monolingual Turkish populace over and against the multiethnic and multilingual makeup of the Ottoman Empire. Through an emphasis on the tropes of absence and translational reversal, Köşk then brings the history of linguistic modernization in Turkey to bear on contemporary integration policy and an implicit ethnicization of the German language in the Federal Republic of Germany. In doing so, it asks implicit questions about who has the right to speak a language as a nonethnic subject, and to remember a “national” past as both a noncitizen and a nonresident.

Shifting frames: Turkish immigrant children's rescaling practices in two school settings in Arizona

This study uses the framework of space and scale to examine how bilingual Turkish heritage children in Arizona respond to conflicting scalar language hierarchies (Blommaert et al., 2005; Blommaert, 2007) they are exposed to in the bilingual worlds and spaces which they navigate. At their US elementary school, where monolingual English language practices are advocated and heritage languages such as their own Turkish language are downscaled, they use Turkish at the margins to create private spaces and footings (Shankar, 2008; Goffman, 1981) where they can help and interact with Turkish peers and express personal stances, rescaling Turkish language practices. In their Turkish Saturday school, where monolingual Turkish practices and “speaking Turkish beautifully” are advocated by teachers, child peers embrace English language practices and Turkish–English code-switching as their preferred media of peer talk away from teachers and as media to explore home and personal meanings (e.g., religious meanings). Children's patterns of code-choice and language use rescale language resources in the two school settings, and allow them to forge alignments with peers. They also provide a resource for stance-taking and commenting on boundaries between languages drawn by adults in the bilingual worlds they navigate (Bailey, 2007; Jaffe, 2009; Kyratzis and de León 2019).

Adjectives in the Acquisition of Turkish: A Developmental Profile

Acquisition of adjectives have been touched upon in a number of research in Turkish. These studies have shown that, although acquired after nouns and verbs, children use both attributive and predicative adjectives at early ages (Ekmekci 1979; Sofu 1995; Sofu and Turkay 2010; Tribushinina et al. 2010). Taking the findings of these studies as a starting point, this study aims to draw a developmental profile regarding the form, function and frequency of adjectives used in the conversations of monolingual Turkish speaking children and to reveal whether age and gender have any effect on the use of adjectives. For this present study, longitudinal data were used and all grades from the 1st to 8th grade were included. In each grade, there were two subgroups, a boys-only group and a girls-only group, The results showed that simple adjectives are more common than derivational and complex adjectives. The gender difference is seen on the form, variety and function of adjectives.

Turkish synonym identification from multiple resources: monolingual corpus, mono/bilingual online dictionaries, and WordNet

In this study, a model is proposed to determine synonymy by incorporating several resources. The model extracts the features from monolingual online dictionaries, a bilingual online dictionary, WordNet, and a monolingual Turkish corpus. Once it has built a candidate list, it determines the synonymy for a given word by means of those features. All these resources and the approaches are evaluated. Taking all features into account and applying machine learning algorithms, the model shows good performance of F-measure with 81.4%. The study contributes to the literature by integrating several resources and attempting the first corpus-driven synonym detection system for Turkish.

First-language skills of bilingual Turkish immigrant children growing up in a Dutch submersion context

ABSTRACTThe interdependence between the first and second language of bilingual immigrant children has not received sufficient attention in research. Most studies concentrate on mainstream language skills of immigrant pupils. In some studies, the gaps in the language development of immigrant children are documented by comparing mainstream pupils with immigrant children. The competence in the first language receives very little attention. In order to show the role of first language competence in second-language acquisition and lower school achievement, we present the findings of our empirical study by comparing bilingual Turkish immigrant children (n = 30, mean age = 67.27 months) in the Netherlands and monolingual Turkish speakers (n = 30, mean age = 66.97 months) in Turkey. The evidence presented in this paper shows that compared to monolingual Turkish speakers, Turkish immigrant children lag behind in their first language cognitive concepts, lexical, syntactic, and textual skills. Mothers’ education level turns out to be an important factor in explaining the performance differences of immigrant children. This would have an effect on their concept and cognitive development as well as on their second-language acquisition.

Choice of address terms in conversational setting

A choice of an address term signals the relationship between language and society and how a person imagines his/her relationship with the addressee within this society. Address terms, therefore, provides sociolinguistic information about the interlocutors as well as pragmatic aspect of the situation. Previous research have focused on the effect of power and solidarity in the choice of address terms. This study, on the other hand, focuses on the address terms used during spontaneous conversation taking place in a no-power situation. The primary concern of the study is to identify the potential effects of a bilingual situation and a different culture. This study investigated the address terms school children use in a reciprocal situation, which are further analyzed regarding the potential effect of age, gender and being monolingual or bilingual in this issue. For this purpose, the group conversations of 56 monolingual Turkish speaking and 48 monolingual Turkish-Danish speaking children were analyzed. The address terms are coded and classified as emerged from the data. The results have shown that monolingual children use a great variety of address terms while bilingual children dwell on first names more frequently. Choice of address forms are governed by politeness, and positive and negative face. The results will lead to awareness-raising on pragmatic aspects of conversations and social relationship and will have implications on educational context especially in bilingual settings.

Looking at the evidence in visual world: eye-movements reveal how bilingual and monolingual Turkish speakers process grammatical evidentiality.

This study presents pioneering data on how adult early bilinguals (heritage speakers) and late bilingual speakers of Turkish and German process grammatical evidentiality in a visual world setting in comparison to monolingual speakers of Turkish. Turkish marks evidentiality, the linguistic reference to information source, through inflectional affixes signaling either direct (-DI) or indirect (-mIş) evidentiality. We conducted an eye-tracking-during-listening experiment where participants were given access to visual ‘evidence’ supporting the use of either a direct or indirect evidential form. The behavioral results indicate that the monolingual Turkish speakers comprehended direct and indirect evidential scenarios equally well. In contrast, both late and early bilinguals were less accurate and slower to respond to direct than to indirect evidentials. The behavioral results were also reflected in the proportions of looks data. That is, both late and early bilinguals fixated less frequently on the target picture in the direct than in the indirect evidential condition while the monolinguals showed no difference between these conditions. Taken together, our results indicate reduced sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic function of direct evidential forms in both late and early bilingual speakers, suggesting a simplification of the Turkish evidentiality system in Turkish heritage grammars. We discuss our findings with regard to theories of incomplete acquisition and first language attrition.

Comparing the phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual pre-school children

The present study compared a pre-school Turkish-English bilingual child and an age-matched monolingual Turkish and monolingual English child in terms of phonological awareness to explore whether the bilingual child had an advantage over the monolingual children. The phonological awareness of children was tested through word recognition task based on initial phoneme identification. The results in this study revealed that the bilingual child had an advantage on the monolingual peers in terms of phonological awareness.

Reviewing sonority for word‐final sonorant+obstruent consonant cluster development in Turkish

The purpose of this study is to investigate the acquisition patterns of sonorant+obstruent coda clusters in Turkish to determine whether Turkish data support the prediction the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) makes as to which consonant (i.e. C1 or C2) is more likely to be preserved in sonorant+obstruent clusters, and the error patterns of sonorant+obstruent coda clusters. Data from 350 typically developing monolingual Turkish speaking children (aged 2.0–5.11 years) were used in this study. Six types of sonorant+obstruent clusters were targeted for analysis of deletion, vowel lengthening, and substitution processes in C1 and C2 singletons of clusters separately. The results showed that the acquisition of Turkish clusters does not adhere to the SSP as indicated by a higher percentage of C1 errors than C2 errors. In Turkish, vowel lengthening occurred when C1 was deleted. To account for these, it is proposed that the syllable structure of Turkish plays a role in the acquisition process of sonorant+obstruent clusters. It is argued that Turkish children acquire moraic structure at an early age, as evidenced by vowel lengthening.

Is There Something Wrong With Turkish In The Netherlands?

Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) is described as "idiosyncratic", "different" or simply "wrong" by monolingual Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). It is a well-known fact that languages in contact affect each other in various ways (Thomason, 2001). As a result of contact, changes may occur in the linguistic systems of the contact languages. According to Owens (1996), these changes start with the borrowing of multi word unit (construction) structures from the contact language or languages. Based on this observation, this study explores the question if the borrowed structures of Dutch constructions cause NL-Turkish to be identified as unconventional by TR-Turkish speakers. As a case study, unconventional non-finite constructions are analyzed. The results of the analyses reveal structural copying of Dutch constructions in several ways, which causes unconventionality in NL-Turkish.