EARLY CAREER PLENARY SPEAKER
Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, Massachusetts
ABSTRACT
The state of the art in Philippine psycholinguistics
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There has been a slow but steady accumulation of psycholinguistic research focusing on typologically diverse languages over the last decade. In this talk, I provide an overview of the psycholinguistic research on Philippine languages at the sentence-level. I first discuss the grammatical features of these languages (e.g., voice morphology, word order flexibility, and the extraction restriction) that figure in existing research. I then identify domains that existing research explores, discuss the research questions in said domains, demonstrate some of the techniques that psycholinguists have used to investigate these questions, and summarize the findings to date. I advance two claims that emerge across these different domains: (i) the processing pressure Agent-First plays a central role in many of the findings; and (ii) patient-primacy/patient voice advantage cannot be reduced to frequency, but instead is best thought of as an emergent property when competing pressures align. Finally, I outline some future directions for Philippine/Austronesian psycholinguistics.