%0 Journal Article
%T Word order preferences of Tagalog
%A Barbara H£¿hle
%A Jens Roeser
%A Jeruen E. Dery
%A Rowena Garcia
%J First Language
%@ 1740-2344
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0142723718790317
%X 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
%K Child language acquisition
%K sentence production
%K Tagalog acquisition
%K voice
%K word order
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142723718790317