Rowena Garcia
Biographic Data
| ID | 3845267 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rowena Garcia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rowena |
| FAMILY NAME | Garcia |
| SIGNATURE | GARCIA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1363-542X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Is KO OK? Segmentation of Consonant- and Vowel-Initial Words in German-Learning Infants
Infants develop the ability to segment words from continuous speech from the age of 6 months onwards. However, in French- and English-learning infants, this ability initially appears to be restricted to consonant-initial words. Vowel-initial word segmentation only emerges at around 13.5 months of age, or at 11 months when additional segmentation cues are provided. Previous research has attributed this asymmetry to phonological and acoustic differ…
The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition
We live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very little about how most of the world’s languages are acquired, represented, and processed. Therefore, the opportunity to understand our most important and defining species-specific trait is being rapidly lost. In this Perspective, we highlight the extent of this …
Parental Educational Involvement Among Filipino Parents: Exploring Motivators, Facilitators, and Barriers Related to Socioeconomic Status
The benefits of parental educational involvement (PEI) are well documented in the literature, specifically on children's learning outcomes and social‐emotional development. Thus, it is important to explore the factors that influence PEI. This paper is a qualitative study on the motivators, facilitators, and barriers to PEI among low‐income parents in the Philippines. Through purposive sampling, 31 parents were engaged in semi‐structured interview…
Online data collection to address language sampling bias: Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has massively limited how linguists can collect data, and out of necessity, researchers across several disciplines have moved data collection online. Here we argue that the rising popularity of remote web-based experiments also provides an opportunity for widening the context of linguistic research by facilitating data collection from understudied populations. We discuss collecting production data from adult native speakers …
A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures based on data from the Acquisition Sketch Project
Special Issue: In Memory of Barbara F. Kelly
Infants discriminate subtle nasal contrasts late: Evidence from field psycholinguistic experiments on Tagalog-learning infants in the Philippines
Studies suggest that infants initially show universal discrimination abilities. However, this narrative has been heavily based on Indo-European languages. It has also been proposed that infants' speech sound discrimination is affected by acoustic salience, such that acoustically subtle contrasts are not discriminated until the end of an infant's first year. Furthermore, others have suggested an influence of word position and positional frequency …
Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science
Increasing geographical and cultural diversity in research participation has been a key priority for psychological researchers. In this article, we track changes in participant diversity in developmental science over the past decade. These analyses reveal surprisingly modest shifts in global diversity of research participants over time, calling into question the generalizability of our empirical foundation. We provide examples from the study of e…
Finding your voice: Voice-specific effects in Tagalog reveal the limits of word order priming
Collecting language acquisition data from understudied urban communities: A reply to Cristia et al
In the target article, Cristia, Foushee, Aravena-Bravo, Cychosz, Scaff, and Casillas (2023) convincingly show the need to broaden the current language acquisition research base, not only in linguistic diversity, but also in terms of regions and cultural groups studied. In conducting acquisition research in understudied populations, such as in rural settings, the authors highlight the importance of using a multi-method approach. They present the c…
Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: First Truly Global International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021
A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researche…
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 features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language res…
Filipino Children's Acquisition of Nominal and Verbal Markers in L1 and L2 Tagalog
Western Austronesian languages, like Tagalog, have unique, complex voice systems that require the correct combinations of verbal and nominal markers, raising many questions about their learnability. In this article, we review the experimental and observational studies on both the L1 and L2 acquisition of Tagalog. The reviewed studies reveal error patterns that reflect the complex nature of the Tagalog voice system. The main goal of the article is…
Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline
Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article. The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of lang…
How diverse is child language acquisition research
A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal…
Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog: A Multivariate Corpus Analysis of Caregiver and Child Speech
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined t…
Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog
The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming
We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children and adults completed a structural priming task that manipulated voice and word order, with the u…
Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment: An eye-tracking study
We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent…
Tagalog adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: History, process and preliminary results
This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS- MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and adults (N=27) are pres…
Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
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, des…
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 features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language res…
Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog: A Multivariate Corpus Analysis of Caregiver and Child Speech
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined t…
Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science
Increasing geographical and cultural diversity in research participation has been a key priority for psychological researchers. In this article, we track changes in participant diversity in developmental science over the past decade. These analyses reveal surprisingly modest shifts in global diversity of research participants over time, calling into question the generalizability of our empirical foundation. We provide examples from the study of e…
Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
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, des…
The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming
We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking children and adults completed a structural priming task that manipulated voice and word order, with the u…
Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment: An eye-tracking study
We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent…
Tagalog adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: History, process and preliminary results
This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS- MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and adults (N=27) are pres…
Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog
Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline
Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article. The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of lang…
How diverse is child language acquisition research
A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal…
Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog: A Multivariate Corpus Analysis of Caregiver and Child Speech
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined t…
Finding your voice: Voice-specific effects in Tagalog reveal the limits of word order priming
Collecting language acquisition data from understudied urban communities: A reply to Cristia et al
In the target article, Cristia, Foushee, Aravena-Bravo, Cychosz, Scaff, and Casillas (2023) convincingly show the need to broaden the current language acquisition research base, not only in linguistic diversity, but also in terms of regions and cultural groups studied. In conducting acquisition research in understudied populations, such as in rural settings, the authors highlight the importance of using a multi-method approach. They present the c…
Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: First Truly Global International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021
A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researche…
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 features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language res…
Filipino Children's Acquisition of Nominal and Verbal Markers in L1 and L2 Tagalog
Western Austronesian languages, like Tagalog, have unique, complex voice systems that require the correct combinations of verbal and nominal markers, raising many questions about their learnability. In this article, we review the experimental and observational studies on both the L1 and L2 acquisition of Tagalog. The reviewed studies reveal error patterns that reflect the complex nature of the Tagalog voice system. The main goal of the article is…
The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition
We live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very little about how most of the world’s languages are acquired, represented, and processed. Therefore, the opportunity to understand our most important and defining species-specific trait is being rapidly lost. In this Perspective, we highlight the extent of this …
Parental Educational Involvement Among Filipino Parents: Exploring Motivators, Facilitators, and Barriers Related to Socioeconomic Status
The benefits of parental educational involvement (PEI) are well documented in the literature, specifically on children's learning outcomes and social‐emotional development. Thus, it is important to explore the factors that influence PEI. This paper is a qualitative study on the motivators, facilitators, and barriers to PEI among low‐income parents in the Philippines. Through purposive sampling, 31 parents were engaged in semi‐structured interview…
Online data collection to address language sampling bias: Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has massively limited how linguists can collect data, and out of necessity, researchers across several disciplines have moved data collection online. Here we argue that the rising popularity of remote web-based experiments also provides an opportunity for widening the context of linguistic research by facilitating data collection from understudied populations. We discuss collecting production data from adult native speakers …
A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures based on data from the Acquisition Sketch Project
Special Issue: In Memory of Barbara F. Kelly
Infants discriminate subtle nasal contrasts late: Evidence from field psycholinguistic experiments on Tagalog-learning infants in the Philippines
Studies suggest that infants initially show universal discrimination abilities. However, this narrative has been heavily based on Indo-European languages. It has also been proposed that infants' speech sound discrimination is affected by acoustic salience, such that acoustically subtle contrasts are not discriminated until the end of an infant's first year. Furthermore, others have suggested an influence of word position and positional frequency …
Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science
Increasing geographical and cultural diversity in research participation has been a key priority for psychological researchers. In this article, we track changes in participant diversity in developmental science over the past decade. These analyses reveal surprisingly modest shifts in global diversity of research participants over time, calling into question the generalizability of our empirical foundation. We provide examples from the study of e…
Is KO OK? Segmentation of Consonant- and Vowel-Initial Words in German-Learning Infants
Infants develop the ability to segment words from continuous speech from the age of 6 months onwards. However, in French- and English-learning infants, this ability initially appears to be restricted to consonant-initial words. Vowel-initial word segmentation only emerges at around 13.5 months of age, or at 11 months when additional segmentation cues are provided. Previous research has attributed this asymmetry to phonological and acoustic differ…
Psychology (17 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Language Development and Disorders (13 works) · Tagalog (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (6 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (6 works) · Language acquisition (5 works)