A Case Study on Verb Bias in Cebuano Monolingual Childs Utterances

(Accepted for parallel paper presentation, 2014 International Conference on Applied

Linguistics and Language Education, October 2014, De La Salle University, Manila,
Philippines)

Cris Delatado Barabas

University of San Carlos, Cebu City, The Philippines
cdbarabas88@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

The present paper reports on a case study conducted to determine whether a 4
year-old Cebuano-Bisaya (one of the major languages in the Philippines)
monolingual child has a noun or verb bias in her utterances. Drawing on Lucas and
Bernardos 2008 framework, the present study investigates the presence of nouns
in the initial position and final position as well as the presence of verbs in the initial
and final positions of the utterances. Through a candid twenty (20) minute recorded
conversation with an interlocutor, the child manifested verb bias in her utterances.
The present paper argues that language structure, and the type and amount of input
that a child receives play a major role in vocabulary development and sentence
production. The paper discusses the pedagogical implications of the result in mother
tongue based multilingual education (MTBMLE) instruction in the Philippines.

Bio-note:

Cris D. Barabas is a candidate for the MA in Applied Linguistics degree at the
University of San Carlos, Cebu City, The Philippines. He is also a lecturer in language,
speech, literature, and survey of visual arts courses in the same university. He
received his undergraduate degree double major in linguistics and literature from
USC. His MA thesis proposal explores the language use in promotional genre of
Philippine higher education institutions. His interests are corpus linguistics, critical
discourse analysis and psycholinguistics.