Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Is Children's Acquisition of the Passive a Staged Process? Evidence from Six- and Nine-Year-Olds' Production of Passives |
| Author: | Katherine Messenger |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/psychology/people/katherine-messenger |
| Institution: | University of Edinburgh |
| Author: | Holly P. Branigan |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | University of Edinburgh |
| Author: | Janet F. McLean |
| Institution: | University of Edinburgh |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition |
| 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. |
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This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 39, Issue 5, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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