Agent–patient word-order preference in the acquisition of Tagalog

ABSTRACT This study investigated 3-, 5- and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children's mastery of agent-focus (active) and patient-focus (passive) sentence structures. In contrast to the usual English developmental pattern with actives and passives, the Tagalog children generally showed better mastery of patient-focus sentences than agent-focus sentences. These results were attributed to the children's strategy of interpreting the first noun of a sentence to be the agent of the action. The structure and usage of these sentence types in Tagalog do not appear to provide linguistic pressures favouring such a strategy. Thus these results are consistent with the view that such a strategy might be non-linguistic in origin.