Morphological processing of Turkish derived words: Does bilingualism affect the processing route?

Authors

Murselin Tasan
İstanbul Medipol University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4677-0927
Serkan Uygun
Bahçeşehir University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0880-9280
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7816/imuling-15-2025-01X017

Synopsis

It has been suggested that native speakers may develop different processing patterns in their first language as they become proficient second language users. While most of the studies are conducted with heritage speakers whose first language is the minority language in the society they live in, the number of studies that investigate first language as the majority language remains scarce. These studies have shown that high proficiency in a second language can influence first language processing even in the majority language context (van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002; Uygun & Gürel, 2020). The aim of the present study is to explore how proficient Turkish-English late bilinguals process Turkish derived words. 61 monolingual Turkish speakers and 46 proficient Turkish-English late bilingual speakers were tested via a masked priming experiment. The stimuli consisted of (i) transparent words (dalga “wave”, dal “dive” and –ga is the derivational suffix), (ii) opaque words (karga “crow”, kar “snow” but –ga does not function as a derivational suffix), and (iii) form/control words (devre “period”, dev “giant”, –re is not an existing derivational suffix). The results showed no significant group differences in the morphological processing of Turkish derived words. While both monolingual and bilingual speakers employed decomposition for transparent and opaque words, no morphological parsing was observed for the form/control words. These results suggest that not only monolingual but also bilingual speakers decompose derived words regardless of their transparency, suggesting that high proficiency in a second language does not affect the morphological processing route of the first language.

Keywords: Turkish derivation, Morphological processing, Semantic transparency, First language, Proficient late bilinguals

 

This study was supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK) under the Grant Number 223K342. The authors thank to TUBITAK for their supports. We also thank Ayşe Gürel for her help and recommendation in designing the stimuli list and Ece Nur Temuçin for her help with participant recruitment and data collection.

Author Biographies

Murselin Tasan, İstanbul Medipol University

Mürselin Taşan is a Research Assistant in the English Language Teaching (ELT) Program at the Faculty of Education, Istanbul Medipol University. Taşan completed undergraduate studies in the ELT Department at Kocaeli University and subsequently earned a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in English Language Education from Bahçeşehir University, graduating as the valedictorian of the department. Currently, Taşan is pursuing a Ph.D. in the same field at Bahçeşehir University. Holding an internationally recognized CELTA certification, Taşan has served as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructor in California. Throughout their academic career, Taşan has acquired six years of experience teaching English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) at the tertiary level, instructing multinational student cohorts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Currently focusing on doctoral dissertation research and various academic projects, Taşan’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of EAP/ESP, Cognitive Science, Learning Environments, and Positive Psychology.

Serkan Uygun, Bahçeşehir University

Dr. Serkan Uygun is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University. He completed his undergraduate studies in the English Language Teaching (ELT) department at Istanbul University in 2000, and earned his master's (2010) and doctoral (2016) degrees in the English Language Education program at Yeditepe University. In the subsequent stages of his academic career, he served as a postdoctoral researcher on a project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) in Germany (2018–2021). Dr. Uygun’s primary research interests revolve around psycholinguistics, bilingualism, Turkish as a heritage language, and morphological processing. He is particularly recognized for his experimental studies investigating how Turkish heritage speakers in Germany process and model semantic (e.g., definiteness) and morphological (e.g., subject-verb agreement, aorist generalizations) features. His research has been published in prestigious international journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, and Frontiers in Psychology. Currently, he serves as the principal investigator for a psycholinguistic project funded by the TÜBİTAK 3501 program, which examines morphological processing in L1 and L2 speakers.

cover image

Volume

Contemporary Studies in Linguistics I

Pages

311-334

Published

December 31, 2025

Series

Contemporary Linguistics Series

Categories

Copyright (c) 2025 The Authors and Editors

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Tasan, M., & Uygun, S. (2025). Morphological processing of Turkish derived words: Does bilingualism affect the processing route? . In O. Cinar, F. Başbuğ, & H. Aydemir (Eds.), & (Ed.), Contemporary Studies in Linguistics I (Vol. I, pp. 311-334). Artsurem Publishing. https://doi.org/10.7816/imuling-15-2025-01X017