Search for: All records

A well-received generalization in Tagalog is that only the argument that is cross-referenced by voice is eligible for A-bar extraction. However, recent work has shown that agents that are not cross-referenced by voice are also eligible. We provide naturally occurring data, along with experimental evidence, consistent with this more permissive picture. Further, we present computational evidence that participants were treating agent-extractions not cross-referenced by voice categorically, that is, they were either accepting or rejecting them in any given trial. Thus, we identify a piece of grammatical knowledge (i.e., extraction) that is systematic within an individual speaker but varies unpredictably across a population of Tagalog speakers. In other words, our data reveal two separable types of Tagalog speakers vis-à-vis extraction. We propose that this is a form of grammar competition that arises via the idea that the agent-first bias affects how child learners parse input strings under noisy conditions during acquisition. 

Over the last decade, there has been a slow but steady accumulation of psycholinguistic research focusing on typologically diverse languages. In this review, we provide an overview of the psycholinguistic research on Philippine languages at the sentence level. We first discuss the grammatical features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language researchers and summarize the empirical terrain. We advance two claims that emerge across these different domains: ( a) The agent-first pressure plays a central role in many of the findings, and ( b) the generalization that the patient argument is the syntactically privileged argument cannot be reduced to frequency, but instead is an emergent phenomenon caused by the alignment of competing pressures toward an optimal candidate. We connect these language-specific claims to language-general theories of sentence processing.