Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Child Language, 2019
We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five-and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eyetracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).
Information Structure and Ordering Preferences in Child and Adult Speech in English
2018
When communicating with their interlocutors, speakers refer to entities that are “old” (mentioned in prior discourse) as well as entities that are “new” (introduced for the first time). In the course of language production, speakers must choose how to order “old” and “new” referents in their utterances; that is, speakers must linearize their thinking for the purpose of speaking (Levelt, 1989). Typically, adults order previously mentioned old referent first, before they introduce referents that are new. The “old-before-new” (or “given-beforenew”) ordering principle has been documented in a variety of construction types in languages (Bock & Irwin, 1980), in experimental studies of scrambling in languages such as Japanese (Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003), and in corpus-based studies of the dative alternation (Arnold, Losongco, Thomas, & Ginstrom, 2000). This paper explores whether the preference for the “old-before-new” order is general and robust, as expected of a natural, universal princip...
Semantic influences on emergent preferences of word order: Evidence from silent gesture
2020
Across the world’s languages, some word orders are more common. We focus on noun phrases, where it is more common for adjectives to follow the noun than to precede it. Because the interpretation of adjectives depends on the noun they modify, we propose and evaluate the new hypothesis that the order NADJ is more prevalent because it is beneficial for semantic processing. In a silent gesture task, speakers of four typologically-unrelated languages (English, Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish) communicated noun phrase meanings to a partner. We find, first, that our task tracks the typologicallypreferred orders of nouns, adjectives and numerals in the noun phrase. More importantly, we find support for our semantic processing hypothesis: size adjectives, whose interpretation depend more on the noun they modify, were more likely to be gestured after the noun than shape adjectives whose interpretation is less dependent on the noun they modify.
Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese
Languages, 2020
The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the "old-before-new" word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general "old-before-new" IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children's early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.
Word order preferences for direct and indirect objects in children learning Korean
Journal of Child Language, 2002
Pre-school Korean children typically manifest higher comprehension rates on the ‘unmarked’ SOV sentences of their language than on the ‘scrambled’ OSV patterns. To date, however, scant attention has been paid to children's ordering preferences with respect to direct and indirect objects. The results of an act-out comprehension experiment involving 40 subjects (aged 4;0 to 7;0) show a strong, statistically significant preference for the accusative–dative order, despite evidence that the reverse order is more common in mother-to-child speech. Two hypotheses are considered, one involving the relationship between word order and grammatical relations and the other involving the relationship between word order and the types of situations denoted by the sentences in question. The results of a follow-up study involving transitive verbs with instrument arguments provide strong evidence in favour of the latter hypothesis.
Word order doesn't matter: Relative clause production in English and Japanese
Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting …, 2009
Comparatively little is known about how semantic properties (such as animacy) and syntactic properties (such as word order) affect production of complex sentences. Relative clauses were elicited using a picture description task that manipulated head noun animacy in both English (which has head-first relative clauses and Japanese (head-final relative clauses). Participants of both languages produced more passive relatives with animate than inanimate heads, suggesting that a common underlying production constraint motivates structure choice. Different proportions of passive relatives with inanimate heads across languages suggest a role for both cognitive constrains as well as language-specific patters as factors that affect structure choice in language production.
The Acquisition of Word Order in Different Learner Types
2000
The aim of this work is twofold. First, I will examine whether the acquisition of word order is subject to transfer in child second language learners (cL2), as has been claimed for adult second language learners (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996). Second I will provide a classification of the cL2 children on the basis of the frequency of transfer, using predictions that can be derived from the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (FTFA Schwartz & Sprouse 1996). I will investigate two groups of young children acquiring German (L1 French) and French (L1 German) as a second language at the age of 3-4. In particular, I will analyze the acquisition of word order by looking at the subject and verb position in main clauses and the OV/VO parameter (Neeleman and Weerman 1999) taking into account all clauses with complex verbs. According to the FTFA: a) transfer must be systematic at the onset of acquisition and b) all of the syntactic differences in the L1 must be transferred into the L2 grammar. I will demonstrate that, contrary to the prediction of the FTFA, the attested transfer seems to depend on the structural properties of the languages involved, rather than reflecting full transfer from L1 to L2. More precisely, what seems to look like transfer is asymmetrically distributed in the observed syntactic domain: German children acquiring French do not transfer the German V2 into French, while French children acquiring German use the ungrammatical V3 structure, even in later stages of acquisition. In main clauses with a complex verb, transfer appears in both groups of children. This paper is organized as follows: in section 2, I will outline the differences between French and German in the syntactic domain under investigation. In section 3, I will present the data. In section 4 and 5, I will move to the results. In section 6 conclusions will be drawn.