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.