This article reports on the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. A distinctive feature of Tagalog is a unique system of voice that creates competing patterns, each with different possibilities for relativization. This study of children’s performance on agent and patient relative clauses in a comprehension task revealed an agent relative clause advantage. These findings cannot be explained by the voice preference in declarative clauses, but are compatible with an explanation based upon input frequency factors.

No abstract

The current study revealed a dearth of research studies, limited diversity of research articles, limited research dissemination and funding concerns. It is suggested that the results of the current study can serve as a reference point to restructure research systems in the Philippines and in other developing countries, and offer data that can be used to develop a research agenda for the profession.

Effects of animacy and agent prominence in linguistic and cognitive processing are well-established in the literature. However, it is less clear how strongly an agent argument will influence production and comprehension when a sentence also contains another prominent argument. We examine this question with Tagalog, a verb-initial language, which designates a syntactically prominent, subject-like element (the pivot) without demoting the grammatical status of the core agent. We implemented two experiments that investigated the influences of agent and pivot prominence on syntactic linear word order patterns in production and on anticipatory gaze patterns in comprehension. Tagalog’s grammar allowed us to separate the influence of agentivity from animacy by manipulating the animacy of the pivot (animate pivots: agent and benefactive voices; inanimate pivots: patient and instrument voices). The production results contrasted with the comprehension results: agent and pivot prominence both emerged strongly in a fragment-completion production task, but animacy dominated anticipatory gaze patterns in a visual-world comprehension task. The results of these experiments demonstrate variability in production and comprehension outcomes as well as an apparent mismatch between the constraints that shape these two systems, which we attribute to contrasting goals in production versus comprehension and to the organization of information in verb-initial languages. The investigation highlights the value of research on languages with typologically understudied structural properties in revealing mechanisms of the production and comprehension systems.

In the target article, Cristia, Foushee, Aravena-Bravo, Cychosz, Scaff, and Casillas (2022) convincingly show the need to broaden the current language acquisition research base, not only in linguistic diversity, but also in terms of regions and cultural groups studied. In conducting acquisition research in understudied populations, such as in rural settings, the authors highlight the importance of using a multi-method approach. They present the challenges in adapting these methods to new settings and offer possible ways to promote this type of research. In this commentary, we extend the discussion to understudied urban communities, as we encounter several of the concerns raised in Cristia et al. when collecting observational and experimental language acquisition data from Metro Manila, Philippines. We first describe the community we study, the challenges and modifications needed for conducting research in this setting, and end with a discussion of possible strategies to promote research in communities with understudied populations.