Processing Relative Clauses in Turkish as a Second Language

The present study focuses on the processing of relative clauses in Turkish as a second language. The specific purpose of the study is to address the gap in the previous research with regard to why certain relative clause constructions should be more difficult to process than others. For example, in English, object relative clauses such as "the lion that the cow carries" are more difficult to comprehend and produce than subject relative clauses such as "the lion that carries the cow." It has been stated for both L1 and L2 learners that these observed differences in difficulty parallel the implicational relationships in Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (NPAH). Although there has been some research on this issue, the question of why the acquisition order follows this pattern has never fully been answered since different theories make the same predictions for languages that have been investigated thus far. However, in an SOV language like Turkish, because of its particular structural characteristics, the predictions of those theories diverge, and thus their separate effects can be disentangled. Therefore, the present study explores the issue using the Turkish language. The results of picture selection tasks taken by 20 English and 7 Japanese, Korean and Mongolian learners of Turkish indicate that learners have an easier time with processing object relative clauses than subject relative clauses contrary to the results in the literature for the same construction in other languages. These results have significant implications for the theory of second language acquisition. These implications include, among others, questions about the accuracy of current views of "interlanguages" (language learner languages) and of the role of "language universals" in second language acquisition