@phdthesis{Garcia2018,
  author    = {Garcia, Rowena},
  title     = {Thematic role assignment and word order preferences in the child language acquisition of Tagalog},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-421742},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xvii, 201},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {A critical task in daily communications is identifying who did what to whom in an utterance, or assigning the thematic roles agent and patient in a sentence. This dissertation is concerned with Tagalog-speaking children's use of word order and morphosyntactic markers for thematic role assignment. It aims to explain children's difficulties in interpreting sentences with a non-canonical order of arguments (i.e., patient-before-agent) by testing the predictions of the following accounts: the frequency account (Demuth, 1989), the Competition model (MacWhinney \& Bates, 1989), and the incremental processing account (Trueswell \& Gleitman, 2004). Moreover, the experiments in this dissertation test the influence of a word order strategy in a language like Tagalog, where the thematic roles are always unambiguous in a sentence, due to its verb-initial order and its voice-marking system. In Tagalog's voice-marking system, the inflection on the verb indicates the thematic role of the noun marked by 'ang.' First, the possible basis for a word order strategy in Tagalog was established using a sentence completion experiment given to adults and 5- and 7-year-old children (Chapter 2) and a child-directed speech corpus analysis (Chapter 3). In general, adults and children showed an agent-before-patient preference, although adults' preference was also affected by sentence voice. Children's comprehension was then examined through a self-paced listening and picture verification task (Chapter 3) and an eye-tracking and picture selection task (Chapter 4), where word order (agent-initial or patient-initial) and voice (agent voice or patient voice) were manipulated. Offline (i.e., accuracy) and online (i.e., listening times, looks to the target) measures revealed that 5- and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children had a bias to interpret the first noun as the agent. Additionally, the use of word order and morphosyntactic markers was found to be modulated by voice. In the agent voice, children relied more on a word order strategy; while in the patient voice, they relied on the morphosyntactic markers. These results are only partially explained by the accounts being tested in this dissertation. Instead, the findings support computational accounts of incremental word prediction and learning such as Chang, Dell, \& Bock's (2006) model.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{GarciaRoeserHoehle2018,
  author    = {Garcia, Rowena and Roeser, Jens and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog},
  series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {491},
  issn      = {1866-8364},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-420598},
  pages     = {28},
  year      = {2018},
  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.},
  language  = {en}
}