Allocation of Attention During Tagalog Sentence Comprehension

It has long been known that sentence comprehension is a fairly complex task because of how different sources of knowledge (i.e., syntactic, lexical, pragmatic, discourse, context) interact during sentence processing (Harrington, 2001). Despite this, most children can still master their native language by age 3 or 4. Sentence production and comprehension are even more remarkable when we consider human cognitive limitations, such as short-term working memory (Schacter, 2001). These limitations can cause difficulties in comprehension of sentences, but it is possible to compensate for this limitation within the language itself. A theoretical model of sentence processing and language acquisition called the Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) was developed in order to account for how the linguistic features of languages can help guide sentence comprehension despite the limitations of short-term working memory. The Competition Model assumes that lexical knowledge is emphasized as the main controller of parsing, processing, and acquiring language (MacWhinney, 1988). This basic tenet is compatible with the dominant view of current sentence processing research, which emphasizes the role of lexical knowledge in language processing (Ellis, 1998, 2002; Harrington, 2001). The model also draws on "connectionist modeling and parameterized mathematical modeling as tools to account for input driven learning" (MacWhinney & Pleh, 1997, p.70), which mirrors cognitive science's interest in connectionist models (Gasser, 1990) to map cognitive processes. Before expanding on the mechanisms behind the Competition Model, it is best to first understand the nature of the linguistic features that are used by the model to generate sentence comprehension. In every language, lexical items are connected to other lexical items by means of role relations. For instance, the verb "hit" functionally specifies two arguments (nominals). The first argument is the agent who does the action (e.g., John hits). The second argument involves the patient, or the entity affected or changed by the hitting action (e.g., hit the ball). The functional connections of these lexical items then specify the roles of (a) the action and the agent and (b) the action and the patient. Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1987) posit that the statistical and informative properties of these linguistic features (ex. frequency and information value) have an important role during language processing and acquisition. Bates and MacWhinney (1989) quantify statistical and informative properties of linguistic features in the context of cue strength and cue validity within the Competition Model. Cue strength reflects a psychological and subjective property of a cue that the language learner or child develops. Of course, the strength of a similar cue varies from language to language (Clifton & Duffy, 2001). For instance, the first noun that appears before the verb in an English sentence is strongly associated with an agent, and thus it becomes the strong cue for an agent (Gernsbacher & Hargreaves, 1989). In Italian, on the other hand, the noun that appears before the verb in a sentence is more strongly associated with a topic than with an agent. Therefore, the strength of the preverbal position cue for an agent among English speakers is much greater than that among Italian speakers. On the other hand, cue validity is assumed to be the most predictive determinant of cue strength (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). Cue validity is an objective property of the cue. Language learning is the process by which speakers assign and adjust cue strength (i.e., an individual's knowledge of cues) according to cue validity. One of the earliest tests of cue validity across languages was conducted by Bates and MacWhinney (1984). The methodology used in this study was an agent-identification task in which the native English, German, and Italian speaker is presented with simple transitive sentences consisting of two nouns and a verb. …