TY  - JOUR
A1  - García, Rowena
A1  - Roeser, Jens
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog
T1  - Use of word order and morphosyntactic markers
T2  - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics
N2  - 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.
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48831
SN  - 1048-9223
SN  - 1532-7817
VL  - 26
IS  - 3
SP  - 235
EP  - 261
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -