Symmetrical and asymmetrical voice systems and processing load: Pupillometric evidence from sentence production in Tagalog and German

Abstract

The voice system of Tagalog has been proposed to be symmetrical in the sense that there are no morphologically unmarked voice forms. This stands in contrast to asymmetrical voice systems, which exhibit unmarked and marked voices (e.g. active and passive in German). This article investigates the psycholinguistic processing consequences of the potential (a)symmetries in the voice systems of Tagalog and German by analyzing changes in cognitive load during sentence production. Tagalog and German native speakers’ pupil diameters were recor Show more