Processing of preverbal scrambling in Turkish

Abstract

This psycholinguistic study aims to find out the effects of scrambling in processing and perception of congruency in Turkish sentences. In line with this aim, another purpose of the present study is to find out whether scrambling focused arguments, question-answer orientation, and position of focused argument affect processing and perception of congruency in Turkish. The material used in the study is composed of 32 main question-answer pairs, which are scrambled according to the aforementioned three factors to make up 256 pairs, and are administered to 50 native Turkish speakers as a self-paced reading test and the participants are asked to evaluate the congruency relationship between each question-answer pair. The reading time for each linguistic element in the answers, as well as the judgment calls (perceived congruency) and the response time for each judgment call concerning question-answer pairs (congruency response time), are recorded and the mean scores of reading time, judgment calls, and the duration of judgment calls are compared via three-factor ANOVA. Data analyses show that scrambling and scrambling focused arguments, question-answer orientation, and position of focused argument cause differences in sentence processing and the perception of congruency to varying degrees. To be more precise, it is found that object-focused pairs, congruent pairs and focused arguments in the immediate preverbal position require lower processing time than subject-focused sentences, incongruent sentences and focused arguments in the clause-initial position. In terms of the effects of scrambling on the perception of congruency, it is seen that question-answer orientation leads to a difference in the perception of congruency while the focused argument causes a difference in the duration of the grammatical judgment calls, similar to the results obtained concerning reading time data. In the end, it can be concluded that scrambling the focused arguments, the position of the focused arguments, as well as the question word and the focused argument in question-answer pairs, have an important role to cause differences in sentence processing and the perception of congruency in Turkish.