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

Garcia, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1363-542X, Roeser, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4463-0923 and Hoehle, B, 2019. Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog: use of word order and morphosyntactic markers. Language Acquisition, 26 (3), pp. 235-261. ISSN 1048-9223

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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 self-paced 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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Language Acquisition
Creators:	Garcia, R., Roeser, J. and Hoehle, B.
Publisher:	Routledge
Date:	2019
Volume:	26
Number:	3
ISSN:	1048-9223
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/10489223.2018.1525613 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	01 Oct 2018 15:34
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2019 03:00
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/34595

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