Acceptability of Wh-Movement in Turkish L1 Learners of English: A Quantitative Analysis Across Proficiency Levels

This quantitative study investigates Turkish L1 learners’ acceptability judgment of English wh-movement structures by focusing on interrogative sentences. The study specifically focuses on two types of wh-patterns which are wh-movement (e.g., What did Mary do?) and wh-in-situ (e.g., *Mary did what?). Since Turkish is a wh-in-situ language which allows wh-phrases to remain in their original position, whereas English is a wh-movement language which requires wh-phrases to move to the sentence initial position, this study investigates how Turkish learners of English judge these two contrasting structures. To collect the data, a grammaticality judgment task (GJT), adapted from Toma (2020), is administered to students at METU English Preparatory School, whose classes are organized by proficiency level, from beginner level to upper-intermediate level, based on their placement test results. Participants judge grammatical and ungrammatical examples of these structures, and the resulting data is presented through descriptive statistics. Guided by the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis, the study expects that low-proficiency learners will exhibit L1 transfer effects, reflected in relatively high acceptability of ungrammatical wh-in-situ structures. In contrast, high-proficiency learners are expected to show reduced transfer effects and greater sensitivity to English-specific wh-movement constraints, resulting in clearer distinctions between grammatical and ungrammatical sentence types. Overall, the study aims to provide empirical evidence on how proficiency mediates L1 transfer and grammatical restructuring in the acquisition of English wh-movement by Turkish learners.