When Human Universal Meets Language Specific

In the broadest sense, this dissertation is an effort to better understand human linguistic capacity. Empirically, I focus on Tagalog filler-gap dependencies (FGDs) and how comprehenders understand them. To successfully interpret FGDs, comprehenders must encode in memory the elements that form the dependency, maintain the grammatical and thematic relations between these elements, and the licensing requirements of the elements encountered thus far throughout the course of interpretation. These are some of what we do when comprehending language more generally. What appears to be an effortless process is in fact a complex ability involving interactions between different classes of information---some linguistic, some, not.The primary goal of this dissertation is to better understand the classes of linguistic information that comprehenders attend to and use when processing FGDs. I examine this question in two contexts: (i) the role of morphological information like voice morphology in the incremental processing of Tagalog FGDs; and (ii) the role of syntactic information like word order, as well as the role of intervening linguistic material and linguistic experience, in relative clause processing. The secondary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the growing efforts to incorporate data from "smaller" languages in psycholinguistic research to directly address the lack of linguistic diversity that the field suffers from.The main insight of this dissertation is that Tagalog, a language that is typologically different from the more familiar languages well-characterized in psycholinguistics, exhibits what seems to be universal properties of language comprehension: (i) comprehenders actively associate a filler to a gap even before the availability of disambiguating information; and (ii) they prefer relative clauses with subject gaps over relative clauses with object gaps. There are, however, language specific properties that can modulate how actively comprehenders link the filler to the gap---like finer grained information about the dependencies, for example---or that can attenuate the robust preference for subject gaps in relative clauses---like the relative order of the head noun and the relative clause, for instance

The acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog: A comprehension study

This thesis analyzed relative clause (RC) comprehension in Tagalog. Results from a reference selection task revealed that the children's accuracy was already comparable to adults by 7 to 9 years of age when processing agent RCs. These findings are consistent with the literature. However, when reaction times (RTs) and error-types are considered, a different picture of the trajectory of acquisition emerges. The children's RTs did not pattern like adults until 10 to 14 years of age. They also avoided reversal-errors as consistently as adults only at 10 to 14 years of age. With regard to non-agent RCs, the RT of children, ages 10 to 14, already patterned like adults but their accuracy still remained significantly different. Children also avoided agent-errors as consistently like adults only at 10 to 14 years of age. Overall, these results suggest a more piecemeal trajectory of the development of RCs in Tagalog

When Human Universal Meets Language Specific

In the broadest sense, this dissertation is an effort to better understand human linguistic capacity. Empirically, I focus on Tagalog filler-gap dependencies (FGDs) and how comprehenders understand them. To successfully interpret FGDs, comprehenders must encode in memory the elements that form the dependency, maintain the grammatical and thematic relations between these elements, and the licensing requirements of the elements encountered thus far throughout the course of interpretation. These are some of what we do when comprehending language more generally. What appears to be an effortless process is in fact a complex ability involving interactions between different classes of information---some linguistic, some, not.The primary goal of this dissertation is to better understand the classes of linguistic information that comprehenders attend to and use when processing FGDs. I examine this question in two contexts: (i) the role of morphological information like voice morphology in the incremental processing of Tagalog FGDs; and (ii) the role of syntactic information like word order, as well as the role of intervening linguistic material and linguistic experience, in relative clause processing. The secondary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the growing efforts to incorporate data from "smaller" languages in psycholinguistic research to directly address the lack of linguistic diversity that the field suffers from.The main insight of this dissertation is that Tagalog, a language that is typologically different from the more familiar languages well-characterized in psycholinguistics, exhibits what seems to be universal properties of language comprehension: (i) comprehenders actively associate a filler to a gap even before the availability of disambiguating information; and (ii) they prefer relative clauses with subject gaps over relative clauses with object gaps. There are, however, language specific properties that can modulate how actively comprehenders link the filler to the gap---like finer grained information about the dependencies, for example---or that can attenuate the robust preference for subject gaps in relative clauses---like the relative order of the head noun and the relative clause, for instance