Tümcesel öznelerin ana dil ve ikinci dilde işlenmesinde uzunluk ve dışa kaydırma kuralının etkisi

This thesis focuses in the sentence processing of sentential subjects in English and tries to find out if the phenomenon "heavy-NP shift" and "extraposition" of sentential subjects in different sentential subject length and sentential subject position conditions play a role in sentence processing in L2. The participants were composed of three native-language groups, Turkish native speakers (N=13), German native speakers (N=10) and English native speakers (N=13). Since the data collection process was English, the first two groups showed their English proficiency, B2 at the lowest level due to the level of the experimental items according to CEFR. A self-paced reading experiment, during which sentences with sentential subjects in English at different lengths and in different positions, were shown to the participants and statistical analyses were applied to the reading times of the participants while they were processing the subject and the verb. The result yielded that verb processing was the one which different between L1 and L2 speakers of English and this thesis proposes in the light of the previous theories and studies that these results may have been observed as seeing the verb, as the head of a constituent, starts the attachment of the dependent constituents to the head, which is another stage in sentence processing after storing the previously seen words one by one.