Does Bilingualism Affect the Morphological Processing of Turkish Derived Words? Insights from Turkish-English Bilinguals

22nd International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, İzmir, Türkiye, 4 - 06 Eylül 2025, ss.48, (Özet Bildiri)

It has been suggested that native speakers may develop different processing patterns

in their first language (L1) as they become proficient second language (L2) users. While most

of the studies are conducted with heritage speakers whose L1 is the minority language in the

society, the number of studies that investigate L1 as the majority language is scarce. These

studies have shown that a high proficiency foreign language can influence native language

processing even in the L1 context in the domain of lexicon (van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002) and

morphological processing (Uygun & Gürel, 2020).

The aim of the present study is to investigate the potential changes in Turkish-English

late bilinguals’ processing of L1 derived words, as this will provide valuable insights into the

processing of morphologically complex words in the bilingual mental lexicon. The two main

models proposed for morphological processing are decomposition (i.e. parsing into

constituent morphemes) and full-listing (i.e. whole word storage).

In the present study, 61 monolingual Turkish speakers and 40 Turkish-English late

bilingual speakers were tested by using a masked priming experiment. All late bilingual

speakers had a high proficiency in English. 66 words that made up the stimuli were separated

into three categories: (i) transparent words (dalga ‘wave’, dal ‘dive’ and –ga ‘derivational

suffix’), (ii) opaque words (karga ‘crow’, kar ‘snow’ but –ga does not function as derivational

suffix), (iii) form/control words (devre ‘period’, dev ‘giant’, –re is not a derivational suffix).

Primes were either related or unrelated to the target word and they were presented for 42

seconds.

The preliminary results indicate no significant group differences in the morphological

processing of Turkish derived words. While both monolingual and Turkish-English late

bilingual speakers employed decomposition for transparent and opaque words, no

decomposition was observed for the form/control words. These results suggest that not only

monolingual but also Turkish-English late bilingual speakers use decomposition and the

transparency of the derived word does not influence the processing route, indicating no

influence of high L2 proficiency on the morphological processing of L1.