Neurolinguistic & psycholinguistic investigations on evidentiality in Turkish

participants’ moment-by-moment eye-movements while they interact with 
different types of visual evidence. Our visual stimuli included picture pairs 
that encoded either ‘witnessed’ or ‘inferable non-witnessed’ events, which 
were appropriate for the use of direct and indirect evidential forms, 
respectively. In particular, we sought to answer the following questions:

Do early and late bilinguals differ from monolinguals in their 
processing of evidentiality?

Do monolingual, early and/or late bilingual Turkish speakers 
differ in their processing of direct and indirect evidentials?
Given the findings of previous studies on early bilingual heritage speakers 
living in the U. S., inflectional morphology seems to be particularly 
affected. This is consistent with Arslan et al.’s (in press) findings for early 
bilingual speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands. Considering these data, we 
expect early bilinguals to show a reduced sensitivity to evidentiality in 
comparison to monolingual Turkish speakers. If this is a consequence of 
incomplete acquisition, then early bilinguals will also be sensitive to 
evidentiality compared to late bilinguals, who we expect to pair with the 
monolinguals. The hypotheses we introduced above moreover predict an 
asymmetrical insensitivity in bilingual participants' responses to direct and 
indirect evidential forms. Specifically, the Interface Hypothesis predicts 
more problems during bilinguals’ processing of the indirect than the direct 

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evidential forms. According to this hypothesis, integrating information from 
multiple linguistic domains - in particular, integrating morphosyntactic and 
pragmatic information - is difficult for speakers who have not fully acquired 
the language under investigation. Recall that the use of indirect evidentials 
is licensed only in specific pragmatic contexts that require more or less 
complex inferential reasoning, whereas direct evidentials are used as an 
'elsewhere' form in the absence of such contexts, signaling that an event was 
witnessed directly. The Regression Hypothesis also predicts more problems 
in bilinguals’ responses to indirect than to direct evidential forms as the 
former are acquired later in development.