The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming

Garcia, Rowena; Kidd, Evan

doi:10.1080/15475441.2020.1814780

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…It also means we have limited understanding of how children might acquire typologically rarer phenomena (e.g. symmetrical ‘Philippine-style’ voice, see Garcia & Kidd, 2020), which are existence proofs of what is possible in natural language and may be particularly challenging to theories built primarily on very different languages. We once again reiterate that these understudied features cannot be assumed to be surface variations masking the same underlying system; they represent unique design solutions to the core function of language – communication – having independently evolved across many successive generations of individual cultural groups.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

2022

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

2022

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“…For western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages, only little is known about the influence of priming on voice choice. In recent studies on the acquisition of the Tagalog voice system, Garcia et al (2018) and Garcia and Kidd (2020) investigate the effects of structural priming on word order, but as far as we are aware, no experimental research on priming and voice choice is yet available for symmetrical voice languages.…”

Section: Structural Primingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting voice choice in symmetrical voice languages

Riesberg

Farré

Malcher

et al. 2021

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Western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages exhibit at least two basic transitive constructions. This paper investigates what factors influence speakers’ choice of one voice over another in natural spoken discourse. It provides a thorough assessment of all factors that have been proposed to be relevant for voice choice in the literature on symmetrical voice systems. Using the Indonesian language Totoli as a case study, we show that unlike in languages with asymmetrical voice alternations, argument-related properties such as topicality, activation state, animacy, etc. do not play a major role in voice choice in symmetrical voice languages. We argue that for symmetrical voice alternations other factor groups are relevant than for asymmetrical voice alternations and that the clear structural differences between the two alternation types are mirrored in functional differences.

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“…Considering that the children (and the adults as well) must decide the thematic role of the sole noun in N CASE V given the transitive events without any supplementary clues, their performance in this condition suggests that, when children interpret a transitive event, they may not employ this strategy automatically and immediately in a linguistically underinformative environment. This challenges the claim that children have the default mapping of the agent onto the first noun as an intrinsic bias for comprehension (e.g., Abbot‐Smith et al., 2017; Gertner et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2013; Jackendoff & Wittenberg, 2014) and rather aligns with the recent findings in Tagalog that dispute this claim (Garcia & Kidd, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Limits on the Agent‐First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

Shin¹

2021

Cognitive Science

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It has long been believed across languages that the Agent‐First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case‐marking in Korean, an SOV language with case‐marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent‐first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case‐marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case‐marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case‐marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean‐speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent‐First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.

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The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming

Cited by 17 publications

References 59 publications

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

Predicting voice choice in symmetrical voice languages

Limits on the Agent‐First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

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