Processing Evidentiality in Bilingualism and Aphasia: An Overview of Some Recent Studies on Turkish

Abstract

Evidentiality, the linguistic indication of information sources from which a speaker knows his statement, is grammatically obligatory and is expressed through inflectional morphology for direct and indirect information sources in Turkish. Although it is a rather well-studied system regarding its theoretical basis and its acquisition in children, experimental studies targeting persons with aphasia or bilingual individuals measuring time-sensitive aspects of evidentiality processing are scant. This chapter provides an overview of evidentiality in Turkish and details out recent neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies on evidentiality in this language, reporting the time-course of evidentiality processing evidenced with timed sentence verification, eye-tracking and other behavioural data. In the light of these data, the chapter evaluates some controversies on evidentiality in Turkish, making clear implications as to how evidentiality processing is modulated by psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic factors.