The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming

Abstract

We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children and adults completed a structural priming task that manipulated voice and word order, with the uniqueness of Tagalog allowing us to tease apart priming of thematic role order from that of syntactic roles. Participants heard a description of a picture showing a transitive action, and were then asked to complete a sentence of an unrelated picture using a voice-marked verb provided by the experimenter. Our results show that children gradually acquire an agent-before-patient preference, instead of having a default mapping of the agent to the first noun position. We also found an earlier mastery of the patient voice verbal and nominal marker configuration (patient is the subject), suggesting that children do not initially map the agent to the subject. Children were primed by thematic role but not syntactic role order, suggesting that they prioritize mapping of the thematic roles to sentence positions.

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

“…It also means we have limited understanding of how children might acquire typologically rarer phenomena (e.g. symmetrical ‘Philippine-style’ voice, see Garcia & Kidd, 2020), which are existence proofs of what is possible in natural language and may be particularly challenging to theories built primarily on very different languages. We once again reiterate that these understudied features cannot be assumed to be surface variations masking the same underlying system; they represent unique design solutions to the core function of language – communication – having independently evolved across many successive generations of individual cultural groups.…”

Predicting voice choice in symmetrical voice languages

“…For western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages, only little is known about the influence of priming on voice choice. In recent studies on the acquisition of the Tagalog voice system, Garcia et al (2018) and Garcia and Kidd (2020) investigate the effects of structural priming on word order, but as far as we are aware, no experimental research on priming and voice choice is yet available for symmetrical voice languages.…”

Limits on the Agent‐First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

“…Considering that the children (and the adults as well) must decide the thematic role of the sole noun in N CASE V given the transitive events without any supplementary clues, their performance in this condition suggests that, when children interpret a transitive event, they may not employ this strategy automatically and immediately in a linguistically underinformative environment. This challenges the claim that children have the default mapping of the agent onto the first noun as an intrinsic bias for comprehension (e.g., Abbot‐Smith et al., 2017; Gertner et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2013; Jackendoff & Wittenberg, 2014) and rather aligns with the recent findings in Tagalog that dispute this claim (Garcia & Kidd, 2020).…”