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Ultimate attainment in the use of collocations among heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany and Turkish–German returnees*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2015

JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER Open the ORCID record for JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER [Opens in a new window] ,
MICHAEL DALLER ,
REYHAN FURMAN  and
JASON ROTHMAN
JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
MICHAEL DALLER
Affiliation:
University of Swansea
REYHAN FURMAN
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
JASON ROTHMAN
Affiliation:
University of Reading, UiT the Arctic University of Norway
*
Address for correspondence: Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Institute of Education, University of Reading, London Road Campus, 4 Redlands Road, Reading, RG1 5EXj.c.treffers-daller@reading.ac.uk
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Abstract

In this paper we show that heritage speakers and returnees are fundamentally different from the majority of adult second language learners with respect to their use of collocations (Laufer & Waldman, 2011). We compare the use of lexical collocations involving yap- “do” and et- “do” among heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany (n = 45) with those found among Turkish returnees (n = 65) and Turkish monolinguals (n = 69). Language use by returnees is an understudied resource although this group can provide crucial insights into the specific language ability of heritage speakers. Results show that returnees who had been back for one year avoid collocations with yap- and use some hypercorrect forms in et-, whilst returnees who had been back for seven years at the time of recording produce collocations that are quantitatively and qualitatively similar to those of monolingual speakers of Turkish. We discuss implications for theories of ultimate attainment and incomplete acquisition in heritage speakers.

Keywords

Heritage languageultimate attainmentincomplete acquisitionTurkishreturnees
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 504 - 519
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We are very grateful for the comments received from the anonymous reviewers of this paper and for the help given by Seda Kan and Kubilay Yalçın in collecting and transcribing the Turkish data. In addition we acknowledge financial support for the data collection from the Research Fund of Boğaziçi University and the Language Contact Fund of the University of Amsterdam. Finally, we would like to thank Ludovica Serratrice for her support in the reviewing process.

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