• Organisation

The aim of this paper is to examine the issue of cross-linguistic influence in Third Language Acquisition from a processing perspective. The focus is on word order, particularly on verb placement in German declarative sentences by presenting the data from Turkish learners of German. Since the participants‟ second language or third language is English, no significant evidence was found that could be referred as neither influence of syntactic properties of Turkish nor of English. Although German is a V2 lan- guage, Turkish and English are not V2 languages. On the other hand, although German and Turkish are SOV languages, English is a SVO language. Thus, if there is transfer in syntax, it should be expected that these properties are somehow transferred. In this study we have found that processing syntactic elements of a foreign language is due to cognitive procedures rather than the influence of another language