Events

Kate Messenger

Title: Six- and nine-year-old children’s production of passives

Abstract:
Research on children's comprehension and production of the passive has yielded contradictory results concerning the age at which they acquire the structure. There is evidence from syntactic priming for early abstract syntax, which doesn't fit easily with evidence from other studies showing a delay in children's acquisition of the passive. This talk presents a priming study that manipulated Structure (active vs. passive) and Verb-type (agent-patient vs. theme-experiencer), with 9-year-olds (Experiment 1) and 6-year-olds (Experiment 2). Our results suggest a staged process of acquisition of the passive, in which children may acquire a syntactic representation for the passive before they acquire its semantic characteristics: by six children have acquired the constituent structure of passives and are therefore susceptible to priming of this structure, but they continue to make errors with the semantic role mapping. By nine children have mastered both the syntactic and semantic aspects of this structure.

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