@article{GarciaDeryRoeseretal.2018,
  author    = {Garcia, Rowena and Dery, Jeruen E. and Roeser, Jens and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children},
  series = {First language},
  volume    = {38},
  journal   = {First language},
  number    = {6},
  publisher = {Sage Publ.},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {0142-7237},
  doi       = {10.1177/0142723718790317},
  pages     = {617 -- 640},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children's agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults' lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{GarciaRoeserHoehle2019,
  author    = {Garcia, Rowena and Roeser, Jens and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment},
  series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {673},
  issn      = {1866-8364},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-46967},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469678},
  pages     = {533 -- 555},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eye-tracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, \& Bock, 2006).},
  language  = {en}
}
@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}
}