Second language acquisition of nominal inflection in Turkish

Abstract

This study aims to investigate second language (L2) acquisition of Turkish nominal inflectional morphemes by L2 learners with typologically distinct L1s, namely Russian, Japanese, English and Chinese. Two experimental tasks were used to collect data from a total of 90 participants (72 L2 learners and 18 native speakers of Turkish). The first task was a timed oral production task where participants were required to produce grammatical sentences using pictures with relevant lexical items. A total of 95 pictures, each depicting a specific event, were presented via DMDX. Thirty of these were used to elicit target morphemes (Ablative, Accusative, Dative, Locative Case and Plural suffix), 60 were used as fillers, and there were five trial items. The second task was a written forced elicitation task consisting of 40 multiple-choice items. The participants were asked to choose the option that best completes a given sentence. In addition to the experimental tasks, a cloze test was used to gather information about participants’ L2 Turkish proficiency. The most noticeable difference between the native and non-native groups was in the use of Accusative Case. Furthermore, as predicted by the L1 transfer view, while L2 learners with L1 Russian outperformed all other L2 groups in both tasks, L1 Chinese learners were the least accurate. Across the groups, Locative and Ablative Case morphemes were found to be used more accurately than Plural and Accusative Case in both tasks. The findings imply an accuracy order across L2 groups, governed mostly by L1 morphological features.