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.

摘要

我们报告了两个实验，这些实验调查了他加禄语对称语音系统的习得，这是西方南岛语系语言在语言学上罕见的特征，在该语言中，有多个基本的及物构造，并且不偏向于使主体成为句法主体。在实验中，讲塔加洛语的3岁，5岁和7岁的儿童和成人完成了一个结构化的启动任务，该任务可操纵语音和单词的顺序，他加禄语的独特性使我们可以从主题角色顺序的启动中分离出句法角色。参与者听到了一张图片的描述，该图片显示了传递动作，然后要求他们使用实验者提供的带有语音标记的动词来完成无关图片的句子。我们的研究结果表明，儿童逐渐获得了病患在病前的偏好，而不是将代理默认映射到第一个名词位置。我们还发现了对患者语音言语和名义标记配置（患者是受试者）​​的较早掌握，这表明孩子们最初并未将代理映射到受试者。儿童是按主题角色而不是句法角色先行的，这表明他们优先考虑将主题角色映射到句子位置。