Children ’ s Passives and Their Resulting Interpretation

All studies that have examined children’s comprehension of passives using both actional (e.g. wash) and psychological (e.g. see) verbs in English have found a significant interaction of voice (active vs. passive) and verb type (actional vs. psychological), with psychological passives being answered most poorly. Accounts differ as to whether a grammatical impairment with passive syntax underlies these difficulties. We present experimental evidence supporting delayed syntactic knowledge of the passive construction in young children (including actional and psychological short passives), the lack of processing accounts for this delay, and children’s resultative analysis of passives.