Turkish heritage speakers’ comprehension of Turkish proverbs: the role of familiarity

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

The main objective of this research was to study the comprehension level of heritage speakers of Turkish with regard to Turkish proverbs. The familiarity factor in relation to its role in comprehending proverbs is also examined. Familiarity judgments of proverbs were made by heritage speakers of Turkish to determine whether the familiarity ratings of the heritage speakers of Turkish could be associated with their understanding of proverbs. The results of the proverb comprehension tests indicate that the difference between the bilingual heritage speakers of Turkish and baseline monolingual speakers in their comprehension of proverbs was significant. Yet, when the arithmetic mean rank is taken into consideration, both heritage speakers of Turkish and monolinguals display high level performance in their comprehension of proverbs. However, there appears to be a noteworthy difference between the frequency level of heritage speakers’ and monolinguals’ in their encounter with proverbs. Monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in comprehension of proverbs and familiarity rating. Results also showed that familiarity had a nonsignificant correlation with participants’ performance on proverb comprehension.