Rowena Garcia

Rowena Garcia is a Visiting Professor at the University of the Philippines Manila and holds a Tenure-track postdoctoral researcher position at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS Berlin), Germany. Her research focuses on child language acquisition, particularly in morphosyntax, phonology, and multilingualism, with a specialization in Tagalog. She employs corpus analysis and psycholinguistic methods like eye-tracking to study language processing in children.

Education:

• International Doctorate in Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain (IDEALAB), Universities of Groningen, Newcastle, Potsdam, Trento, Macquarie (2015–2018)
• European Master in Clinical Linguistics (Universities of Groningen, Potsdam, Eastern Finland, 2013–2015)
• BS Speech Pathology (University of the Philippines Manila, 2007–2011)

Research Interests: Garcia investigates how children acquire linguistic structures (e.g., negation, voice systems) in symmetrical voice languages like Tagalog. Her work emphasizes the role of word order, morphosyntactic cues, and acoustic salience in language development. She advocates for diversifying language acquisition research to include understudied languages and communities.

Recent Trends in Articles: Her recent work critiques convenience sampling in developmental science, highlights ethical and epistemic costs of cultural bias, and explores methods for collecting data from underrepresented populations. She also pioneers fieldwork approaches in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, addressing language endangerment and code-mixing phenomena.

Awards:

• IASCL Early Career Award (2024)

Grants & Collaborations: Garcia leads projects at ZAS Berlin and collaborates with institutions like Brown University’s Language and Thought Lab, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the University of Potsdam. Her work often involves interdisciplinary teams to bridge clinical linguistics and experimental methods.

Labs/Teams: Active in the Developmental Psycholinguistics group (SFB 1287 Limits of Variability in Language Project) and the Brown Language and Thought Lab. She also co-founded the /L+/ global summer school for language acquisition researchers.