UC Santa Cruz

Learning a morphological process requires generalizing which words undergo the process and what form these words take. Emphatic reduplication in Turkish (TER) is unproductively applied to a small set of adjectives. Despite its unproductiveness, Turkish speakers have been shown to learn the form that adjectives that undergo emphatic reduplication take (Demircan, 1987; Wedel, 1999). This project investigates whether Turkish speakers learn which adjectives can undergo reduplication based on semantic regularities across TER adjectives. The experiments presented here will show that native Turkish speakers generalize over the color semantic class when learning the process of reduplication.