Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog

Garcia, Rowena; Rodriguez, Gabriela Garrido; Kidd, Evan

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104859

Cited by 13 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Importantly, this outcome entails that the relative strengths of agent and pivot prominence with regard to linear word order are comparable, contradicting the third hypothesis in this experiment. The study results are also consistent with a recent corpus study by Garcia et al (2021), which looked at the word order frequencies in AV and PV in child-directed utterances with two lexical noun phrases. They report a strong preference for an Agent–Patient order in the PV, and an overall tendency for an Agent–Patient order in the AV, which weakens in sentences with at least two lexical noun phrases, resulting in flexible word order in this pattern.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 91%

Differential effects of agency, animacy, and syntactic prominence on production and comprehension: Evidence from a verb-initial language.

Bondoc¹,

Schafer²

2022

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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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.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 91%

Differential effects of agency, animacy, and syntactic prominence on production and comprehension: Evidence from a verb-initial language.

Bondoc¹,

Schafer²

2022

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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“…Our own work on children’s processing in languages like Cantonese, Mandarin and Tagalog has shown that online parsing choices are intimately tied to input frequency (e.g. Chan et al, 2018; Garcia, Garrido Rodriguez & Kidd, 2021; Yang et al, 2020), and cannot be explained solely with reference to abstract, language-independent grammatical principles. In terms of contribution, when we ask the right questions of them, research on lesser studied and typologically diverse languages can move us forward at a faster rate than work on typically studied European languages.…”

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confidence: 99%

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

2022

Self Cite

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A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.

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“…The age factor demonstrated that six-year-olds differed from both four-year-old’s and five-year-old’s. The age of passive voice mastering varies in different languages [ 19 , 25 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. Our previous data demonstrated that children five and six years of age are already quite successful in passive voice comprehension [ 71 ]; at the same time the acquisition process in Russian-speaking children is nonlinear, and even seven-to-eight-year-old TD children can have difficulties with passive voice or reverse word order, especially with syntactically complex, transitive sentences [ 27 , 34 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thematic role encoding varied across different languages: with word position in strong word order languages, like English, or case marking in free word order languages like German or Russian [ 17 , 18 ]. In the Tagalog language, the verb is inflected for voice, aspect, and mood, while the word order is the same for passive and active sentences, so the roles of agent and patient is defined by changing the voice marking of the verb [ 19 ]. Special passive markers like BEI in Mandarin help to interpret correctly thematic roles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The case sensitivity in an adult-like manner was shown in Russian children as young as 4;2 (four years and two months) [ 22 ], while the acquisition of passive is sometimes not finished as late as the age of seven [ 27 ]. The frequency of the grammar tool in the child’s input could be critical to its age of acquisition (AoA) [ 28 ], so AoA varies greatly for the passive through languages [ 19 , 25 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Passive Voice Comprehension during Thematic-Role Assignment in Russian-Speaking Children Aged 4–6 Is Reflected in the Sensitivity of ERP to Noun Inflections

et al. 2022

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Children tend to rely on semantics rather than syntax during sentence comprehension. In transitive sentences, with no reliance on semantics, the syntax-based strategy becomes critical. We aimed to describe developmental changes of brain mechanisms for syntax processing in typically developing (TD) four to six year old’s. A specially designed sentence-picture matching task using active (AV) and passive (PV) voice enforced children to use grammar cues for sentence comprehension. Fifty children with above >60% level of accuracy in PV sentences comprehension demonstrated brain sensitivity to voice grammar markers-inflections of the second noun phrase (NP2), which was expressed in a greater event-related potentials (ERP) amplitude to PV vs. AV sentences in four-, five-, and six-year-old children. The biphasic positive-negative component at 200–400 ms was registered in the frontocentral and bilateral temporoparietal areas. Only in six-year-old children P600 was registered in the right temporoparietal area. LAN-like negativity seems to be a mechanism for distinguishing AV from PV in the early stages of mastering syntax processing of transitive sentences in four to five year old children. Both behavioral and ERP results distinguished six-year-olds from four-year-old’s and five-year-old’s, reflecting the possible transition to the “adult-like” syntax-based thematic role assignment.

show abstract

Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog

Cited by 13 publications

References 68 publications

Differential effects of agency, animacy, and syntactic prominence on production and comprehension: Evidence from a verb-initial language.

Differential effects of agency, animacy, and syntactic prominence on production and comprehension: Evidence from a verb-initial language.

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

Passive Voice Comprehension during Thematic-Role Assignment in Russian-Speaking Children Aged 4–6 Is Reflected in the Sensitivity of ERP to Noun Inflections

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