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Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2011

KATHERINE MESSENGER*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
HOLLY P. BRANIGAN
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
JANET F. McLEAN
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: ktmesseng@gmail.com

Abstract

We report a syntactic priming experiment that examined whether children's acquisition of the passive is a staged process, with acquisition of constituent structure preceding acquisition of thematic role mappings. Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds described transitive actions after hearing active and passive prime descriptions involving the same or different thematic roles. Both groups showed a strong tendency to reuse in their own description the syntactic structure they had just heard, including well-formed passives after passive primes, irrespective of whether thematic roles were repeated between prime and target. However, following passive primes, six-year-olds but not nine-year-olds also produced reversed passives, with well-formed constituent structure but incorrect thematic role mappings. These results suggest that by six, children have mastered the constituent structure of the passive; however, they have not yet mastered the non-canonical thematic role mapping. By nine, children have mastered both the syntactic and thematic dimensions of this structure.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

The authors gratefully thank Antonella Sorace, the children and staff from Bruntsfield Primary School, Edinburgh, who took part in the experiments and Chris Thatcher who drew the stimuli. This research was funded by Economic and Social Research Council award PTA-031-2004-00280 to the first author.

References

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