Children’s early acquisition of the passive: evidence from syntactic priming

We report an experiment that examined 3and 4-year-old children’s representation of the passive structure. Early studies of typically-developing children’s acquisition of the passive suggest that this construction is acquired late and – or that its acquisition is semantically constrained: children comprehend actives much earlier than passives and comprehend actional verb passives earlier than non-actional verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker & Chalkley, 1985). Conversely, some production studies have shown the passive is acquired earlier than thought: 3-4 year old children produce passives following training (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999) and priming (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva & Shimpi, 2004), however, such studies have not examined whether the passive is constrained to actional verbs early on. We report a syntactic priming study that manipulated Prime Structure (active vs. passive) and Verb Type (actional vs. non-actional). We found a strong and reliable effect of Prime Structure for children (27%) and adult controls (19%). There was, however, no effect of Verb Type (Fs < 2). Participants were more likely to produce passive targets following passive primes than active primes, irrespective of the verb. We conclude that children do acquire an abstract syntactic representation for the passive early on (by 3-4 years) that is not constrained by verb type.

[1]  Grover J. Whitehurst,et al.  Selective imitation of the passive construction through modeling , 1974 .

[2]  Holly P. Branigan,et al.  A blue cat or a cat that is blue? Abstract syntax in young children’s noun phrase production. , 2006 .

[3]  Anna L. Theakston,et al.  Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. , 2003, Developmental science.

[4]  R. Hartsuiker,et al.  Syntactic Facilitation in Agrammatic Sentence Production , 1998, Brain and Language.

[5]  Y. Grodzinsky,et al.  Children's Passive: A View from the By-Phrase , 1998, Linguistic Inquiry.

[6]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. , 1999, Developmental psychology.

[7]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive , 1987, Cognition.

[8]  Stephen Crain,et al.  Capturing the Evasive Passive , 2009 .

[9]  Holly P. Branigan,et al.  A blue cat or a cat that is blue? Evidence for abstract syntax in young children's noun phrases , 2005 .

[10]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  Learning to produce passive utterances through discourse , 1998 .

[11]  Andrew J. Stewart,et al.  Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental representation of language , 1995 .

[12]  Stephen Craint,et al.  Competence and Performance in Child Language * , 2009 .

[13]  Adele E. Goldberg,et al.  Can thematic roles leave traces of their places? , 2003, Cognition.

[14]  Mary Anne Chalkley,et al.  Semantic restrictions on children's passives , 1985, Cognition.

[15]  Virginia Valian,et al.  Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension , 2008 .

[16]  Elizabeth Bates,et al.  Functional constraints of the acquisition of the passive: toward a model of the competence to perform , 1991 .

[17]  W. Labov,et al.  Constraints on the agentless passive , 1983, Journal of Linguistics.

[18]  Hagit Borer,et al.  The Maturation of Syntax , 1987 .

[19]  M. Tomasello.  Do young children have adult syntactic competence? , 2000, Cognition.

[20]  F. Ferreira.  Choice of Passive Voice is Affected by Verb Type and Animacy , 1994 .

[21]  N. Budwig,et al.  The linguistic marking of nonprototypical agency: an exploration into children’s use of passives , 1990 .

[22]  Esther Dromi,et al.  Language and cognition : a developmental perspective , 1993 .

[23]  K. Bock,et al.  Framing sentences , 1990, Cognition.

[24]  Andrew W. Ellis,et al.  Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Object Names and Their Relation to Adult Estimates and Other Variables , 1997 .

[25]  J. Chafetz,et al.  Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children's comprehension of passives , 1990, Cognition.

[26]  J. K. Bock.  Syntactic persistence in language production , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[27]  J. Huttenlocher,et al.  Syntactic priming in young children , 2004 .

[28]  G. Dell,et al.  Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production , 2007, Cognition.

[29]  K. Wexler,et al.  Children ’ s Passives and Their Resulting Interpretation , 2005 .

[30]  M. Braine,et al.  How does comprehension of passives develop? A comparison of actional and experiential verbs , 1985, Journal of Child Language.