Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment: an eye-tracking study

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 eye-tracking 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, and Bock, 2006)

Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired

Planning scope in spoken and written sentence production

This thesis investigates two questions about the cognitive mechanisms underlying the advance preparation of sentences. First, how much planning does the language system require to begin outputting a sentence and second, how is this scope determined. Previous research has concluded that advance planning embraces less than the sentence, is determined by either content or structure of some minimal linguistic unit, and is subject to variation (V. S. Ferreira & Slevc, 2007). Unlike previous research, the presented hypotheses were evaluated in both speech and writing. This eliminates explanations in terms of mechanisms that are modality specific, and therefore not fundamental to the language production system (see Alario, Costa, Ferreira, & Pickering, 2006). In two series of three experiments I elicited short sentences in speech and writing (keyboard typing). Under controlled conditions I manipulated (a) structural and lexical properties of elicited sentences (first series, Chapter 2) and (b) conceptual properties of the sentence's message (second series, Chapter 3). Hypotheses were evaluated by measurement of the time required to initiate output of the target sentence and of eye movements to referents of this sentence (arrays of simple line drawings) shown on the computer screen. These suggested two main conclusions: (1) Consistent with some previous research advance planning scopes over coordinated noun phrases (A and the B) while lexical content requires planning for the first noun but not beyond (Chapter 2), demonstrating for the first time that this effect replicates in writing. (2) Whether or not noun phrases are preplanned beyond the first noun is determined at a conceptual level, and not at a syntactic level (Chapter 3). These findings are in line with current models of language production (Bock & Ferreira, 2014; Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2014) and constitute a first step towards confirming the modality independence of these models

Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired

A Photometric Study of the Young Stellar Population Throughout the lambda Orionis Star-Forming Region

We present VRI photometry of 320,917 stars with 11 < R < 18 throughout the lambda Orionis star-forming region. We statistically remove the field stars and identify a representative PMS population throughout the interior of the molecular ring. The spatial distribution of this population shows a concentration of PMS stars around lambda Ori and in front of the B35 dark cloud. Few PMS stars are found outside these pockets of high stellar density, suggesting that star formation was concentrated in an elongated cloud extending from B35 through lambda Ori to the B30 cloud. We find a lower limit for the global stellar mass of about 500 Mo. We find that the global ratio of low- to high-mass stars is similar to that predicted by the field initial mass function, but this ratio varies strongly as a function of position in the star-forming region. Locally, the star-formation process does not produce a universal initial mass function. We construct a history of the star-forming complex. This history incorporates a recent supernova to explain the distribution of stars and gas today.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures; to appear in the Astronomical Journa

Structure in mind, structure in vocal tract

We update our understanding of the view that grammar regulates intersegmental temporal coordination and present an extension of that view to a new domain: we argue that inter-segmental coordination is basic to prosody. It is the glue joining segments together differently in different languages (here, illustrated with examples from Arabic and Spanish) and orchestrates their unfolding in ways corresponding to constructs posited in theoretical analysis. The correspondence is one between organization in mind-brain and organization in vocal tract. Moreover, for both mind-brain and vocal tract, the organization is phonological and abstract. It is so because it holds over segments of various identities: in Arabic, the first segment in /bka/ is not prosodified as part of the same unit as /ka/ and this holds true also for /blat/, /klat/ and so on, regardless of sonority. In contrast, in English or Spanish, a different organization holds. Crucially, uniformity in organization (same organization presiding over sequences with varying segmental makeup) does not imply uniqueness of phonetic exponents: prosodic organization is pleiotropic, simultaneously expressed by more than one phonetic exponent. Finally, two properties of coordination relations are underscored: lawful flexibility and abstractness. The first is revealed in the degrees of freedom with which movements corresponding to any given effector begin; the second in invariances of task-relevant kinematic signatures regardless of the effectors implicated in any given segmental sequence. Once again, abstract phonological structure is mirrored in vocal tracts via coordination relations holding across physiology and the particular modes of its operation