Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
- 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.
Author details: | Rowena GarciaORCiD, Jeruen E. Dery, Jens Roeser, Barbara HöhleORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723718790317 |
ISSN: | 0142-7237 |
ISSN: | 1740-2344 |
Title of parent work (English): | First language |
Publisher: | Sage Publ. |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2018/12/01 |
Publication year: | 2018 |
Release date: | 2021/06/23 |
Tag: | Child language acquisition; Tagalog acquisition; sentence production; voice; word order |
Volume: | 38 |
Issue: | 6 |
Number of pages: | 24 |
First page: | 617 |
Last Page: | 640 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |