Philippine Psycholinguistics

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 featur...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAnnual review of linguistics Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 145 - 167
Main Authors Pizarro-Guevara, Jed Sam, Garcia, Rowena
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Annual Reviews 16.01.2024
Subjects
agent-first
field psycholinguistics
patient primacy
Philippine languages
Tagalog
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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.
ISSN:2333-9683
2333-9691
DOI:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-102844