Chapter 12
Over-sensitivity to the animacy constraint on DOM in low proficient Turkish heritage speakers
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.
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
-
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Cited by
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2022.
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Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25:4
► pp. 603 ff.

Uygun, Serkan & Claudia Felser
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