Does the majority language shape the pragmatic relevance of prosody? Evidence from heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany
While bilingual studies have extensively explored crosslinguistic transfer across various domains, prosody remains relatively underexplored. This study addresses the gap by contributing experimental data on prosodic transfer at lexical and pragmatic levels in heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany. Given typological differences between Turkish and German prosody, this population is ideal for examining whether the heritage language (Turkish) is influenced by the majority language (German) in processing prosodic information across linguistic levels. In a recent study, Zora et al. examined how majority language speakers of Turkish interpret prosodic cues, specifically lexical stress and prosodic focus, when assessing sentence acceptability. Forty participants rated sentences containing prosodic violations, revealing that lexical stress violations elicited lower acceptability than prosodic focus violations. This suggests that lexical-level prosody, rather than pragmatic-level prosody, plays a more central role in spoken comprehension for majority language speakers of Turkish. Building on these findings, this study applies the same paradigm to 40 heritage Turkish speakers in Germany. Results show the reverse pattern, such that prosodic focus violations were rated less acceptable than lexical stress violations. Typologically, this aligns with Germanic languages, where prosodic focus holds greater weight in interpretation under the same experimental paradigm. The results further revealed that proficiency modulated sensitivity to prosodic information, such that high-proficiency speakers of Turkish judged both stress and focus violations as incorrect, whereas low-proficiency speakers judged only focus violations as incorrect. These findings highlight the dynamic nature of prosodic transfer, potentially from German to Turkish, and the significant role of language dominance and proficiency in shaping bilingual prosodic processing.
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