Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi, cilt.31, sa.1, ss.51-71, 2020 (Scopus)
© 2018 Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, İstanbul.The present study addresses whether adults with Broca’s aphasia who have damage in their Posterior Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (PLIFG) show similar performance to typically developing children in their processing of complex syntax. We tested comprehension of Turkish relative clauses using a sentence-picture matching task in Broca’s patients and children with typical development (aged: 3;04-4;03). Both groups showed better performance in subject relative clauses compared to object relative clauses. Children's similar performance to Broca's patients might be due to the fact that PLIFG is a late-maturing neural region. Our participants had more errors in object relative clauses despite the first referent was the agent so there was no evidence for the agent-first strategy. Poor performance in object relative clauses was linked to the morphosyntactic complexity in these structures.