4. Discussion
Even though it has been suggested that processing object relative
clauses could be easier than processing subject relative clauses in
Turkish due to the head-directionality, studies carried out in Turkish
with behavioural metrics showed that ORC processing is more difficult.
In the present study, we aimed to investigate the object vs. subject
relative clause processing in Turkish with an imaging method. To that
end, we asked 14 native Turkish speaker adults to answer a ‘Yes/No’
question about each of 24 sentences containing either ORC or SRC. Our
findings showed that processing ORCs induces more widespread hemodynamic
activity in the prefrontal cortex compared to SRCs as well as a
significantly greater hemodynamic activity in the left (i.e. Broca’s
area) and right DLPFC.