Sentence processing in Turkish: A review and future directions

Abstract

This paper reviews sentence processing research conducted on Turkish and offers insights into future projects that can examine some further questions that take advantage of the typological properties of Turkish. Sentence processing research has focused mainly on processing ambiguous constructions and linguistic dependencies, and sentence processing research in Turkish has followed a similar path. The findings of the reviewed work on Turkish support the primacy of syntax views in sentence processing, since non-syntactic factors were found to be either delayed or observed in sentence-final decisions. The results of the review have also indicated that, despite Turkish being a head-final language, most sentence processing research on Turkish (on both ambiguity and dependency resolutions) showed patterns like those in head-initial languages, except for two studies that showed language-specific behavior dependent on morphology. Although the majority of work on Turkish is supportive of a universal rather than an experience-based parsing mechanism, there appears to be some language-specific tuning that cannot be attributed to head-finality. Future research can further tap into this question and examine the factors that determine experience-based processing. The questions currently addressed in the field are evolving in a different direction. The review concludes with how the typological properties of Turkish –its head finality, flexible word order, and rich morphology- provide generous test grounds for these questions.