TY  - JOUR
A1  - Garcia, Rowena
A1  - Dery, Jeruen E.
A1  - Roeser, Jens
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
JF  - First language
N2  - 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.
KW  - Child language acquisition
KW  - sentence production
KW  - Tagalog acquisition
KW  - voice
KW  - word order
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723718790317
SN  - 0142-7237
SN  - 1740-2344
VL  - 38
IS  - 6
SP  - 617
EP  - 640
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -