Özet:

Relative clauses in Turkish and in English differ syntactically. While in English, ahead-initial language, the relative clause together with a relative pronoun modifiesthe immediately preceding noun phrase, in Turkish, a head-final language, there isno relative pronoun and the relative clauses precede the head noun. The findingsobtained from the studies generally focusing on the acquisition of English relativeclauses have shown that there is a hierarchy from most accessible for relativizationto least accessible, which is named as the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy(NPAH) hypothesis. One of the purposes of this study is to investigate whether 910 year-old Turkish –speaking children learning English follow this hierarchy andfind subject relative (SR) clauses easier to process than object relative (OR) clauses. The findings obtained from the picture-selection task have shown that the participants follow the hierarchy proposed by NPAH and that the learners process SRclauses easier than OR clauses. The reason of such outcome can be explained bythe Structural Distance Hypothesis. Another purpose of this study is to find outwhether the presentation type affects the comprehension of SR and OR clauses. Forthis purpose each item was presented with an imperative or a question. The analyses of the data have revealed that the presentation type may be a factor affectingthe comprehension since the students have comprehended the clauses presentedwith an imperative better than those presented with a question. This may be due tothe fact that the frequency of using imperative sentences may be higher than that ofthe questions in the classroom input. The other purpose of the study is to analyzewhether the errors made by the learners are reversal errors or head errors. Thestudents made more reversal errors and fewer head errors indicating that they significantly comprehended the head of the NP

Anahtar Kelimeler: