Abstraction vs. analogy in the Turkish aorist

The present study examines adults’ processing of the Turkish Aorist, an irregular pattern the acquisition of which is already shown to pose a huge challenge to children up until the age of 8. We investigate how adults produce the Aorist when presented with non-existent monosyllabic roots and to what extent the outcome reflects the application of a rule or the effect of analogy on stored exemplars. Experimental results, associated with a thorough type/token frequency analysis of the aorist in the BOUN corpus, suggest that a rule-based generalization on the basis of the type count of the -Ar affix is at work for over 85% of productions. Similarity-based generalizations, however, though quite few in number appear to be heavily conditioned by the matching last consonant, the matching first and last consonants, overlapping trigram and quadrigram sequences, but not rhyme in Turkish.