Chapter published in:
The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking
Edited by Alexandru Mardale and Silvina Montrul
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 26] 2020
► pp. 313–341

Chapter 12
Over-sensitivity to the animacy constraint on DOM in low proficient Turkish heritage speakers

| University of Cologne
| University of York

This study investigated knowledge of a semantics-morphosyntax interface phenomenon in Turkish-German heritage bilingual speakers: optional accusative case marking on indefinite direct objects, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), in Turkish and its interaction with the animacy of the direct object argument. We investigated whether the non-DOM language German, has an influence on the DOM-language Turkish in Turkish heritage bilingual speakers whose dominant language is German. The results of an acceptability judgment task show no cross crosslinguistic influence from the dominant German; the results reveal instead a sensitivity to animacy level of the indefinite direct objects, since heritage speakers make finer animacy distinctions compared to the monolingual Turkish speakers. The study also shows that proficiency level in Turkish contributes to DOM accuracy in the bilingual speakers.

Keywords: optionality, animacy gradience, semantics-morphosyntax interface, heritage language grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The interaction of animacy and DOM in Turkish
      • Transparent context conveying epistemic specificity
      • Opaque context conveying referential specificity
    • 1.2Acquisition of DOM and the relevant phenomenon in Turkish
    • 1.3Bilingualism research investigating the interaction of animacy with DOM
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Experimental stimuli
    • 2.2Monolingual speakers of Turkish
    • 2.3Heritage speakers of Turkish
    • 2.4The acceptability judgement task
    • 2.5Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Across group comparisons
    • 3.2Within group comparisons for main-animacy levels
    • 3.3Within group comparisons for subanimacy levels
    • 3.4Summary of results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.26.12kra
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