ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

跨语言的一个普遍发现是，幼儿在理解患者初始句时存在问题。我们使用Tagalog（动词初始语言，具有可靠的语音标记系统和高频率的患者语音构造）来测试为解释这一困难而提出的多个帐户的预测：频率帐户，竞争模型和增量帐户处理帐户。研究1对他加禄语儿童定向语音进行了分析，结果表明，主要的论证顺序是“事前”，“句法标记”是主题角色分配的高度有效线索。在研究2中，我们使用了自定进度的听力和图片验证相结合的任务来测试讲塔加禄语的成年人以及5岁和7岁的孩子如何处理可逆的及物句子。结果表明，成年人在所有情况下的表现都很好，而儿童对第一个名词短语的准确性和收听时间表明，与患者语音相比，在座席语音中解释患者初始句子的难度更大。频率帐户和增量处理帐户都部分解释了患者语音优势。