Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. ‘Limitations of online resources’ for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism (‘affix stripping’) as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.

中文翻译：

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传统说话者的形态处理：对土耳其不定过去时的掩蔽启动研究

先前的研究表明，传统的演讲者与屈折形态作斗争。处理非主要语言的“在线资源限制”被认为是造成这些困难的一个可能原因。然而，迄今为止，很少有关于遗产使用者实时语言处理的实验证据。在这里，我们报告了一项蒙面启动实验的结果，该实验由 97 名双语（土耳其语/德语）传统说者和 40 名土耳其非传统说者组成的对照组检查土耳其不定过去时的规则和不规则形式。我们发现，对于常规不定过去时，传统说话者使用与控制说话者相同的形态分解机制（“词缀剥离”），而对于处理不规则变形的形式，它们表现出更多的可变性（即，较不均匀的性能）比对照组。传统演讲者还展示了语义启动效应。在更一般的层面上，这些结果表明，传统说话者利用多种信息来源来识别形态复杂的单词。