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Prosodic Disambiguation of Morphological Ambiguities in Turkish

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Abstract

This study investigates the production and processing of lexical prosody in morphological ambiguities in Turkish. Native speakers of Turkish took part in two read-aloud and two lexical decision experiments. The results showed that in speaking, for both genuine and pseudo words that contrasted in stress, participants changed the fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity to disambiguate; and they changed duration (but not F0 or intensity) to disambiguate words and pseudo-words that did not contrast in stress. In listening, the participants were sensitive to the prosodic (mis)match in stress-contrasting pairs, but not to durational (mis)match presumably because the durational differences between the comparison pairs were shorter than perceivable. The findings show that Turkish speakers use prosody to disambiguate morphologically ambiguous word pairs and that they are sensitive to prosodic cues (at least to those used in stress contrast) when they hear them. Their behavior for pseudo-words suggests that they do so not on the basis of individual word knowledge but productively. The comparison pairs in the current study were segmentally identical, allowing us to attribute the observed prosodic variation only to the morpho-syntactic structure of the ambiguous pairs.

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Notes

  1. Turkish is a vowel-harmony language. Capital letters are used to indicate the vowels which are phonologically underspecified for their backness and rounding features and are subject to vowel harmony rules in Turkish.

  2. Turkish is a pro-drop language.

  3. The term stress is used to refer to lexical accent.

  4. Data loss could have been reduced by embedding the experimental material in a carrier phrase, as such is common practice in phonetic investigations of lexical prosody (e.g., Levi 2005). However, the design required sentences but not words as experimental items and embedding sentences in carrier phrases might have brought unintended variability in sentential prosody. The number of participants (N = 54) in the present study, which is much higher than common in phonetic investigations (e.g., 7 in Levi 2005; 2 in Van Der Mark 2002), is considered to ensure reliability.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cem Murat Deniz and Amaç Herdağdelen for their help with the morphological parsing of the Turkish corpus, and Didar Karadağ and Dilara Tunalı for their meticulous annotations on the speech data.

Funding

Partial financial support was received from Boğaziçi University Scientific Research Projects Start-Up Grant (#15D06SUP2).

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  1. Department of Foreign Language Education, Boğaziçi University, 34342, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

    Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz

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Correspondence to Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz.

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All procedures performed in the present study were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the City University of New York, the Graduate School and the University Center (No. 10-06-142-0/35).

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Deniz, N.D. Prosodic Disambiguation of Morphological Ambiguities in Turkish. J Psycholinguist Res 49, 1083–1111 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-09735-2

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