Supervisors:

I would like to thank my supervisors, Carita Paradis and Mikael Roll, for their invaluable feedback and guidance during the research process and the writing of this thesis. I am grateful to Damon Tutunjian for being the voice of my stimuli and to Sabine Goßelke for helping me finding participants. I also wish to thank my neighbours, who were not here during this summer and Patrik, who always was. 2 The present study investigated second language (L2) learners ’ processing of filler-gap dependencies and tested the implications of Clahsen and Felser’s (2006) shallow structure hypothesis according to which L2 learners underuse syntactic information during the processing of these sentence types. Advanced L2 learners of English (native Swedish speakers) listened to English sentences with object-relative, subject-relative and finite complement clauses. Event-related potentials were recorded at the word that, the embedded verb and the following word: a prepositional phrase, a semantically congruent or incongruent noun phrase or an extra noun phrase ungrammatically occupying the canonical objec