A Corpus-based Study on Turkish Spoken Productions of Bilingual Adults (original) (raw)

Lexical Development of German-Turkish bilinguals: A comparative study in written discourse

This longitudinal study presents the contrastive analyses of lexical development of Turkish-German bilinguals in written discourse in respect to lexical richness and diversity. In order to compare the different text lengths and the relation of types and tokens, as measurement methods, Guiraud (G) and Advanced Guiraud (AG) are used, which factor in age, genre, language and (Turkish) instruction and are proven with an analysis of variance (one way). Results show that lexical measures of diversity, word and text length are sensitive to age. Genre and Turkish instruction seems to play a limited role in lexical usage.

Perceptions and Linguistic Actions of Bilingual Speakers of Turkish and English: An Explanatory Study

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2018

Due to the globalized world, sixty percent of world's population is bilingual today. Such a population calls for the need to understand bilinguals from a holistic perspective since it is likely that we are surrounded by bilinguals and we are raising bilingual children. Therefore, this study investigates bilingualism from five different dimensions; their perception of bilingualism and languages as Turkish and English, prosodic features in these two languages, sense of self, biculturalism and their language choice to get an overview about bilingual speakers of Turkish and English by adopting a qualitative design. Moreover, this study is one of the few studies involving bilinguals of Turkish and English. The data was collected from 29 bilinguals through an open-ended questionnaire. In data analysis, participants were divided into two main groups as early and late bilinguals; the origins of the bilinguals were also taken into account. Bilinguals' responses were examined by using inductive data analysis. The results show that bilingual speakers have a unique profile and they make their decisions depending on the context, culture, self-perception and sense of self. Each bilingual is found to be idiosyncratic with linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour he/she displays.

An Examination of Story Narration by Monolingual and Bilingual Turkish Children

2023

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.

Interlanguage Development of Turkish Speakers of English: Exploring Oral and Written Communication Strategies

Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 2022

Language learners employ communication strategies (CSs) to avoid communication breakdowns in times of difficulty, and such strategies develop within strategic competence thanks to exposure to a target language. This research is designed as a developmental study aiming to investigate the possible effects of exposure to English as a foreign language on the use of CSs in the interlanguage of Turkish speakers of English. To attain this aim, we chose 20 Turkish learners of English from the beginner level, and they designated the topics they would speak and write about. Their oral and written performances on the topics were tested at the beginning prior to instruction, in the middle, and at the end of the academic year to observe whether CS usage altered over time. The findings revealed that participants resorted to different types of CSs in their speaking and writing tasks. The comparison of CS employment in each test showed that learners’ CS preferences, as well as L1 and L2-based CSs, ...

A Functional Description of the Narratives Produced by Kurdish-Persian Bilinguals

Asian journal of social sciences and humanities, 2013

In this paper, we try to discuss some functional categories and their formal expressions in some Kurdish and Persian narratives, as classified by Berman & Slobin (1994). In order to achieve this goal, four Kurdish-Persian bilinguals narrated Mercer Mayor’s book known as “The Frog Story”. The collected data were analyzed to see how these concepts are expressed in either language and to see to what extent those functional categories are reflected in children’s narratives. Here, we have focused on such functional categories as tense, voice, and focus, reflected in the Kurdish and Persian narratives. Based on our analysis, we concluded that Kurdish and Persian narratives follow specific conventions to express these categories and showed some differences and similarities in this respect; For example present perfect and simple past are more frequently seen in Kurdish narratives while Persian tends to use simple present and present progressive instead. Additionally, the participants used m...

Contrastive analysis of Turkish and English in Turkish EFL learners' spoken discourse

The present study aimed at finding whether L1 Turkish caused interference errors on Turkish EFL learners' spoken English discourse. Whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors learners made was further investigated. The participants were given the chance to choose one of the two alternative topics to speak about. The entire videotaped speaking session was further transcribed to analyze the spoken errors. The results indicated that prepositional, lexical, and grammatical errors were the most frequently encountered errors, in descending order. Also, independent samples t-test was applied to the data to determine whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors made by two different English proficiency groups. It was found that there was no significant difference between two different English proficiency groups with regard to the number of errors they made.

Morpho-syntactic properties of simultaneous bilingualism: Evidence from bilingual English-Turkish

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: A number of studies on the acquisition of non-null subject languages in child grammars have suggested that while overt subjects are mainly used with finite forms, null subjects co-occur with non-finite forms. The purpose of this study is to explore the proposed relationship between subject realization and verbal morphology in a simultaneous bilingual context. Design/Methodology/Approach: Longitudinal case study Data and Analysis: The present study analyses longitudinal data from an English-Turkish bilingual child (2;4–3;9), with special reference to the distribution of finite forms and the suppliance of overt subjects on the one hand, and subject drop and the use of non-finite forms, on the other. The English/Turkish data comprise 37 recordings collected regularly for nearly 18 months. Findings/Conclusions: English-Turkish bilingual data show that the majority of the overt subjects in the English language of the bilingual child occur both with inflected and uninflected verb forms. At a time the child has consistent and productive suppliance of overt subjects in his English, he uses uninflected verb forms with overt subjects, suggesting that the proposed association discussed in the literature does not necessarily hold. Moreover, around the same time the bilingual child's Turkish presents robust evidence for the productive and systematic use of inflected forms as well as omission of subjects. Originality and significance/implications: These data, based on a less commonly studied language pair, English-Turkish, challenge previous research that postulates an association between overt subjects and finite forms versus null subjects and non-finite root forms. Overall, there appears to be a relationship between the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in the bilingual child's Turkish and the correct suppliance of overt subjects in his English, suggesting language-particular devices for the realization of person deixis. Keywords English-Turkish simultaneous bilingual acquisition, overt and null subjects, finite and non-finite root forms, longitudinal data

A multilingual corpus approach to postpredicativity in spoken Turkish, Kurmanji Kurdish and German

Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, 2021

This paper investigates phenomena of postpredicativity in a Turkish- Kurmanji Kurdish-German trilingual corpus of spoken language. Starting from the assumption that postpredicativity when viewed in this trilingual perspective is an epiphenomenal effect of argument type in Kurmanji, finite verb movement in German and discourse activation status (next to illocutionarily motivated verb fronting) in Turkish, it sets out to explore overlaps and double motivations. Based on a collection of 1,211 findings, differentiations within the categories as well as overlaps at several levels are identified. Central results are discourse-level motivations in Kurmanji, their dependence on syntactic size, and overlaps between illocutional verb fronting and discourse activation status in Turkish.

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

Languages

We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch i...