The perception of focus in Turkish as a foreign language

The aim of learning a foreign language is to be able to communicate effectively in the target language. Suprasegmentals play an important role in providing effective communication in the language learning process. The melody, which covers all the tonal changes that occur on the sound phrases at the sentence level, and the focus, tone, pause, and tone units that make it up, constitute the suprasegmental phonemes, which are also expressed as pronoun elements. The ability of a foreign language learner to be competent in the target language is possible if he/she can use the prosodic elements in the spoken language correctly. Focus allows speakers to highlight words and phrases that are new or otherwise informative. It is a significant part of the information structure of a sentence, which describes how information in the sentence relates to the discourse as a whole. Correctly producing and understanding focus marking in a new language may be notably challenging because it may require knowledge of several systems, including syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics. The acquisition of prosodic focus marking in a foreign language is a particularly difficult challenge because it requires the learner to discover both which words to emphasize in a particular context and what acoustic cues to use to mark emphasis. This study aims to investigate to what extent Egyptian speakers who learn Turkish as a foreign language and whose mother tongue is Arabic (L1) are successful in perceiving focus. To reveal this, speakers who know Turkish as their mother tongue were also included in the study. There were 12 Turkish and 12 Egyptian participants who knew and were learning Turkish at the B2-C1 level in the study. Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic process, the online perceptional test was applied to the participants. In the analysis of the data, presentational focus (PF), contrastive focus (CF) , and broad focus (BF) were evaluated in the conditions that it was on the subject, object , and verb. Looking at the results obtained, L1 Arabic speakers have the lowest success in focusing perception, while the focus is the broad focus type with a rate of 18.06%, the presentational focus on the object is the type of focus where they are most successful and the success percentage is 80.45%. L1 Turkish speakers were most successful in perceiving the broad focus type with a rate of 91.67%, while the lowest success was in the contrastive focus condition on the verb, the success percentage was recorded as 45.84%.