Morphological Decomposition in Heritage Turkish in the U.S.

Abstract

Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Turkish in the U.S. are unbalanced bilinguals, with Turkish as their morphologically rich, non-dominant language and English as their analytical, dominant language. The present study investigated whether HSs of Turkish process morphologically complex derived words in Turkish and English through decomposition or as whole words. This study also compared HSs’ processing patterns with those of homeland Turkish and homeland English speakers to determine whether HSs’ processing of morphology in the dominant and non- dominant languages relies on the same fundamental mechanisms as does baseline speakers’ morphological processing (Uygun & Clahsen, 2021). Two morphological priming experiments were conducted: the Turkish experiment compared HSs to baseline Turkish speakers; the English experiment compared the same HSs tested in their dominant language to baseline English speakers. The findings suggest that HSs exhibited efficient morphological decomposition in both their weaker heritage language and their dominant language, in that they exhibited morphological priming patterns similar to both baseline groups. In line with previous work on Heritage Turkish (Uygun & Clahsen, 2021; Jacob et al., 2019), these findings suggest that, despite limited exposure to the heritage language, HSs still develop homeland speaker-like morphological decomposition mechanisms for derived words in their heritage language.