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Second Language Acquisition of Turkish
Edited by Ayşe Gürel
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 59] 2016
► pp. 19–48

Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

The effects of purely phonological and phonosyntactic issues

| Indiana University
This paper investigates second language acquisition of lower-level (i.e. word-­level) and higher-level prosody in Turkish to address the role of Universal Grammar (UG) via two different studies. The results of the first study demonstrate that lower-level prosody presents particular challenges for English-­speaking learners, as the task for them involves expunging a prosodic constituent from the grammar, which is hypothesized to be impossible. Higher-­level prosody, on the other hand, was found to be relatively easy to acquire, despite not being taught in Turkish language classes in a comprehensive and linguistically correct manner. Although learners were not native-like in their performance on lower-level prosody, their representations were UG-constrained. Thus, it is concluded that learners have access to UG for prosody at both levels.
Keywords: L2 phonology, prosody, stress, Turkish, Universal Grammar
Published online: 25 May 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.59.02ozc
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