The morphological processing of Turkish derivation in L2 speakers: The role of semantic transparency

While psycholinguistic literature has extensively examined the morphological processing of complex words at the early stages of visual word recognition, much research has been carried out with L1 speakers and focused on inflected words. While the structure of derived words offers an interesting venue for researchers, the number of studies investigating the processing of derived words remains scarce. Studies on derivation typically employ three types of words: (i) transparent words (singer is someone who sings and –er functions as the derivational suffix) (ii) opaque words (corner is not someone who corns and –er does not function as the derivational suffix) and (iii) form/control words (freeze, -ze has no morphological relationship with the root free). 

The present study investigates the same phenomena in Turkish with 61 L1 and 36 L2 speakers by using a masked priming experiment. The L2 group spoke Russian as L1 and was very fluent in Turkish. 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 results showed significant group differences during the early stages of visual word recognition. While both L1 and L2 Turkish speakers used the same processing mechanism when accessing transparent words, they differed from each other when processing opaque words. In other words, both groups employed decomposition for transparent words; however, for opaque words, they used different processing routes. Besides, the groups showed processing differences in the form/control words. While orthographic similarity inhibited the L1 group, it facilitated the processing route in the L2 group despite not reaching the significance level.