Better late than early: The effect of formal second language training on processing of evidentiality in Turkish-English bilinguals
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate how bilingual speakers process information in a bilingual mode setting which was created using a translation production task. The target linguistic property was evidentiality. It is grammatical and obligatory in Turkish and lexical and optional in English. The stimuli consisted of simple declarative sentences which were varied based on the evidential meaning (firsthand vs. non-firsthand). Then participants judged how confident the witness was. Both tasks were performed by 58 late L2 English, late L2 Turkish and early Turkish-English bilingual speakers. The results demonstrated that participants translated firsthand information more correctly than the non-firsthand in all conditions. Translation direction also influenced the accuracy. Furthermore, participants’ confidence judgments varied based on their bilingualism history. We use CASP (Complex Adaptive System Principles) Model for Bilingualism to formulate our predictions.
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Biographies
Sümeyra Tosun is an assistant professor of Department of Psychology in Medgar Evers College (MEC), CUNY. She received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Texas A&M University, specializing in Psycholinguistics. Her research interests examine evidentiality in Turkish, bilingualism, the relationship between language and thought, the organization of bilingual speakers’ minds, the production and appreciation of humor and figurative language, and the influence of handedness and reading-writing direction on perception and gender and culture.
Luna Filipović is a Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on connections and relationships between different approaches to studying language including second language acquisition, interpretation, applied linguistics, translation studies, and cognitive linguistics. She has authored or edited six books in the area of language and cognition in bilingualism, including Talking about Motion: A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Lexicalization Patterns (2007).
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Article first published online: July 26, 2024
Issue published: August 2025
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