Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog: Use of word order and morphosyntactic markers

Abstract

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.

Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment: an eye-tracking study

“…Sixteen transitive verbs (hila 'pull', silip 'peek at', sipa 'kick', huli 'capture', palo 'hit', pasan 'give a piggyback ride', kagat 'bite', tira 'hit', sagip 'rescue', gamot 'cure', pili 'choose', tawag 'call', salo 'catch', karga 'carry', baril 'shoot', and habol 'chase') were used to create semantically reversible sentences (also used in Garcia et al, 2019). In such sentences, both of the nouns that fill the argument positions of the verb can be the agent or the patient of the verb, e.g., Humihila ang baka ng baboy 'The cow is pulling a pig'.…”

“…Based on Chang et al's (2006) model, we would expect Tagalog-speaking children to incrementally interpret the NP1 as the agent, given that the input they receive mostly has an agent-before-patient order (Garcia et al, 2019). Given that Chang et al's (2006) model uses error-based learning, the model also predicts that children would learn to use the morphosyntactic markers in the patient voice earlier than in the agent voice, given that they encounter more patient voice patient-initial sentences in their input than agent voice patient-initial sentences.…”

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

“…We also found priming of thematic role order only in Experiment 1 where all of the primes were in the agent voice, but not in Experiment 2 where the primes were in the patient voice. The result can be attributed to the inverse frequency effect, whereby less frequent structures are more "primeable" (Ferreira, 2003), since the agent voice occurs less frequently in the input compared to the patient voice (Cooreman et al, 1984;Garcia et al, 2018Garcia et al, , 2019.…”

The Predictive Value of Tagalog Voice Morphology in Filler-Gap Dependency Formation

“…Ideally, we would have conducted corpus-based analyses to derive construction-specific cue validities, in the same vein as the first study of Garcia et al (2019b) but with filler-gap dependencies. However, for practicality reasons, we used the results of our judgment study in experiment 1 to estimate voice's cue validities.…”

“…Sauppe (2016) used the visual word paradigm to investigate whether Tagalog comprehenders anticipated the referents of upcoming postverbal arguments based on syntactic function or semantic role in canonical declaratives (i.e., verb-initial sentences). Meanwhile, Garcia et al (2019b) used self-paced listening with pictureselection and eye-tracking while listening (Garcia et al, 2019a) to investigate whether comprehenders leveraged word order and morphosyntactic markers (i.e., case and voice) in the comprehension of canonical declaratives. The present study differs from the previous studies in two ways.…”