Speech Recognition Performances of Early and Late Turkish-German Bilinguals

Turkish is the 16th most spoken language in the world, with approximately 83 million users. Today, based on social reasons, bilingualism and multilingualism are prevalent. Similarly, studies on bilingualism or multilingualism in literature have been increasing. This study aims to show the preliminary results of the Turkish word recognition performance of Turks (Turkish-German bilinguals) living in Germany. In this study, 60 early and late bilingual subjects whose ages ranged from 18 to 65 years old were tested. Speech recognition test material consisted of 120 three-syllabic Turkish words recorded on CD which were played to the bilingual individuals using an IBM 386sx personal computer, Westra Audiometer CAD- 03, and sound insulated room per Industrial Acoustics Company (IAC) standards. The individuals were asked to repeat the Turkish words they listened to. The words were recorded by the author in the way they had been repeated by the individuals. The results were assessed per percentages of word recognition. Turkish-German early bilinguals performed more poorly than late bilinguals in terms of word recognition. This finding indicates that bilingualism may affect early bilinguals’ word recognition performance in terms of auditory processing. It was observed in the literature that bilingual children lag behind their monolingual peers in terms of both vocabulary and grammatical development. The findings in this study are consistent with those studies. More studies are needed for bilingual individuals.