My main interest is in children’s acquisition of Tagalog, one of the major languages of the Philippines; with the broader aim of solving the puzzle of how children endowed with the same brain can learn the different languages of the world.
I analyse recordings of conversations between children and their caregivers, and conduct experiments involving simple tasks such as picture selection and description as well as more high-tech methods like Eyetracking, to see how children process sentences in real-time and how they use the input they receive.
In my current projects I focus on children’s understanding and production of sentences with a 'doer' and a 'receiver'. For example, in the sentence 'dog bites man', the dog is the doer and the man is the receiver.
Garcia, R., Garrido Rodriguez, G., & Kidd, E. (2021). Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog. Cognition, 216: 104859.
Garcia, R., & Kidd, E. (2020). The acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system: Evidence from structural priming. Language Learning and Development, 16(4), 399-425.
Garcia, R., Dery, J. E., Roeser, J., & Höhle, B. (2018). Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children. First Language, 38(6), 617-640.