It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the frequency account, the Competition Model, and the incremental processing account. Study 1 presents an analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech, which showed that the dominant argument order is agent-before-patient and that morphosyntactic markers are highly valid cues to thematic role assignment. In Study 2, we used a combined selfpaced listening and picture verification task to test how Tagalog-speaking adults and 5-and 7-year-old children process reversible transitive sentences. Results showed that adults performed well in all conditions, while children's accuracy and listening times for the first noun phrase indicated more difficulty in interpreting patient-initial sentences in the agent voice compared to the patient voice. The patient voice advantage is partly explained by both the frequency account and incremental processing account. ARTICLE HISTORYdescribe an experiment that tests Tagalog-speaking children's use of word order and morphosyntactic markers for interpreting simple transitive sentences (Study 2). Possible reasons behind children's difficulties with noncanonical sentencesDifferent accounts have been proposed to explain children's difficulties with noncanonical sentences. These claims shed light on the strategies that children use for sentence comprehension, and when children are expected to acquire noncanonical word order in different languages.
We report further evidence that early word segmentation is triggered by rhythmic properties of the language. Our study used the head turn preference paradigm to compare the skills of English and German 9-month-olds to extract bisyllabic trochaic German words from German text passages. Both English and German are stress-timed languages and have trochaic feet as their dominant stress pattern in bisyllabic words. Consequently, no differences in the segmentation strategies used by infants from these two language groups were expected. In line with our predictions, even though the stimulus material contained phonemes that do not belong to the English phoneme inventory and violations of English phonotactics, English-learners were as successful in detecting the words as German infants. These findings replicate those of Houston et al. (2000) with Dutch and English. Thus, our findings provide further evidence that children can exploit processing strategies developed in their own language to process another language. Furthermore, the data suggest that, at least initially, word segmentation in infancy relies on acoustical information in a pure bottom-up fashion without the support of existing knowledge about the language to be processed.
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