Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

Garcia, Rowena; Dery, Jeruen E.; Roeser, Jens; Höhle, Barbara

doi:10.1177/0142723718790317

Cited by 12 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 34 publications

(54 reference statements)

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“…Semantically reversible sentences were created from 16 verbs depicting transitive actions (also used in Garcia et al 2018…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For each lexical verb, two corresponding pictures with reversed roles were created (also used in Garcia et al 2018; see Figure 2a, 2b for examples). Mirror images of these pictures were also produced to counterbalance the side on which each animal or each agent appeared.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only a few studies have focused on the acquisition of Tagalog. In production, Garcia et al (2018) found using a sentence completion task that 5-and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children preferred an agent-before-patient order for both the agent voice and patient voice when describing actions between two animate entities. This agent-initial preference has also been observed in comprehension, with children following a word order strategy for thematic role assignment.…”

Section: Thematic Role Assignment In Tagalogmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Garcia

Roeser

Hoehle

2018

Language Acquisition

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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.

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“…Semantically reversible sentences were created from 16 verbs depicting transitive actions (also used in Garcia et al 2018…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Thematic Role Assignment In Tagalogmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Garcia

Roeser

Hoehle

2018

Language Acquisition

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“…3) and patient-initial structures (Hsieh, 2016). To identify the preferred argument order in both voices, Garcia et al (2018) controlled for voice and animacy in a picture description and sentence completion task. They provided the sentence-initial voice-marked verb prompts (e.g., Hinahabol .…”

Section: Tagalogmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Garcia

Kidd

2020

Language Learning and Development

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We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children and adults completed a structural priming task that manipulated voice and word order, with the uniqueness of Tagalog allowing us to tease apart priming of thematic role order from that of syntactic roles. Participants heard a description of a picture showing a transitive action, and were then asked to complete a sentence of an unrelated picture using a voice-marked verb provided by the experimenter. Our results show that children gradually acquire an agent-before-patient preference, instead of having a default mapping of the agent to the first noun position. We also found an earlier mastery of the patient voice verbal and nominal marker configuration (patient is the subject), suggesting that children do not initially map the agent to the subject. Children were primed by thematic role but not syntactic role order, suggesting that they prioritize mapping of the thematic roles to sentence positions.

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“…One potential explanation for this is the relative frequency of AV and PV in the language. Corpus studies have found that PV is more frequent than AV in transitive sentences (Cooreman et al, 1984;Garcia et al, 2018). One way to reframe this difference in relative frequency is that comprehenders have more experience integrating incoming information when the verb has PV.…”

Section: (A)symmetries As a Window To What Classes Of Information Intmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pizarro-Guevara

Wagers

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Research has shown that when processing filler-gap dependencies, comprehenders do not wait until they encounter all of the bottom-up information in the input. Instead, they use various types of linguistic information to predictively posit a gap that would allow the dependency to be resolved. They can use syntactic (Traxler and Pickering, 1996), lexical (Trueswell et al., 1994), morphological (Kamide et al., 2003), and prosodic (Nagel et al., 1994) information. Here we examine whether Tagalog comprehenders use the language's voice morphology to guide their incremental interpretations. We hypothesized that voice allows comprehenders to commit to an interpretation upon encountering the verb, since they have information about the event structure at this point in time and by virtue of the voice morphology, the thematic role of the filler. In experiment 1, using an acceptability judgment study, we found that comprehenders differed in how they used the different voices in different filler-gap contexts to detect the licitness of displacements. These differences may have consequences for how voice is used in real-time. In experiments 2 and 3, using the stops-making-sense paradigm (Boland et al., 1990), we found that comprehenders used voice as a cue to actively associate the filler with the gap. However, in experiment 3, the way in which they used voice varied by type and varied across types of filler-gap dependencies. We argue that comprehenders were using construction-specific cue validities when processing filler-gap dependencies. However, they also engaged with other classes of linguistic information, including (but not limited to) information about the structural similarities and the thematic complexity of the dependencies involved, and the relative frequency of the different types of voices in the language. These interactions resulted in processing asymmetries.

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Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

Cited by 12 publications

References 34 publications

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

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

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

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

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