Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Congress on Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, Bursa, Türkiye, 24 - 26 Nisan 2026, (Yayınlanmadı)
The architecture of the mental lexicon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) remains a pivotal area of inquiry, particularly for languages with rich agglutinative morphologies and transparent orthographies like Turkish. This study experimentally investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying word recognition in learners of Turkish as a Foreign Language (TFL), focusing on the critical interplay between lexical frequency, grammatical category (part of speech), and lexicality. Employing a Lexical Decision Task (LDT), the research measured reaction times (RTs) to gauge processing efficiency, utilizing stimulus items derived from a specialized corpus of TFL textbooks and validated against the TurkishTenTen reference corpus. The findings reveal a robust lexicality effect, where real words are processed significantly faster than phonotactically legal non-words, supporting the utilization of a direct lexical search mechanism over purely sublexical assembly. A distinct "noun advantage" was observed, with nouns eliciting faster recognition latencies than adjectives, a phenomenon potentially attributable to the higher imageability and concreteness of nominal forms. Furthermore, lexical frequency emerged as a determinant factor, with high-frequency items facilitating significantly faster access, consistent with activation-based models of memory. Unexpectedly, no statistically significant variance in processing speed was found between learners at A2 and B1 proficiency levels, suggesting that the fundamental orthographic recognition pathways stabilize early in the acquisition of transparent scripts. These results are critically analyzed through the lens of the Dual Route Model of word recognition and Part-of-Speech Processing Theories, offering substantial implications for TFL pedagogy, curriculum design, and the understanding of L2 lexical organization.