We congratulate Onur Özsoy on his dissertation entitled ‘Exploring morphosyntactic production and comprehension in Turkish heritage speakers’.
His study delves into how Turkish heritage speakers in Germany and the United States navigate complex morphosyntactic structures (clause combining, case, discourse markers), revealing both capabilities and challenges in their language use. The findings highlight new experimental approaches to heritage language grammars as well as statistical models that account for individual differences in heritage speakers’ language comprehension and production. Among this, the findings point to differential strategies of comprehending grammatical case and producing coordinated sentences.
The defence focused on “Comparing topic drop in the majority language German among heritage speakers of Greek, Russian, and Turkish,” shedding light on possible cross-linguistic influences and heritage language effects in the majority language German setting.