LINGUIST List 23.3787
Mon Sep 10 2012
Diss: Language Acquisition/ English/ Sotho, Southern: Crawford: 'Developmental Perspectives...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxialinguistlist.org>
Date: 08-Sep-2012
From: Jean Crawford <jeaninmali
hotmail.com>
Subject: Developmental Perspectives on the Acquisition of the Passive
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Institution: University of Connecticut
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Jean Crawford
Dissertation Title: Developmental Perspectives on the Acquisition of the Passive
Dissertation URL:
http://jeanerz.com/Crawford2012Dissertation.pdf
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Acquisition
Subject Language(s):
English (eng)
Sotho, Southern (sot)
Dissertation Director:
William Snyder
Maria Polinsky
Diane Lillo-Martin
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the passive. Theapparent cross-linguistic delay of the verbal passive compared to otherconstructions suggests children's knowledge is somehow restricted,leading some to propose the difficulty arises because of syntacticmaturation (Wexler 2004, Orfitelli 2012) or because of a heavy relianceon discourse features assigned to arguments (Snyder and Hyams2008). These hypotheses predict that until relevant mechanismsmature, children will only produce and comprehend a subset ofpassives (i.e., adjectival), or will only show adult-like performance whenfelicity conditions are met. Others have suggested children have notovercome the poverty of the stimulus for passives, arguing thatfrequency of passive in the input determines the timing of acquisition(Kline and Demuth 2010). The prediction of this account is that passiveproduction and comprehension will vary cross-linguistically as afunction of the primary linguistic data.
I argue against both the maturation and frequency accounts with datafrom English and Sesotho. In the Sesotho study, I show that 4-6 yearold Sesotho-speaking children perform adult-like on certain types ofunambiguously verbal passives. Furthermore, I show that Sesotho-speaking children perform no better on any type of passive than theirEnglish-speaking counterparts, although the frequency of passives inSesotho child directed speech is ten times greater than in English.
The English study, a targeted grammaticality judgment task wherefelicity conditions are met, shows that 4-6 year-old English-speakingchildren accept passives with purpose phrases as grammatical,indicating they have verbal passive syntax. This result further providesevidence against frequency as the main source of passive acquisitiondelay, since passives are less than 1% of all English child directedspeech. The results add to growing evidence that English-speakingchildren have knowledge of verbal passives when felicity conditions aremet, though felicity might not be the sole factor.
The overall results indicate children have adult-like knowledge ofverbal passives in most cases, though the source of non-adult-likeperformance requires further explanation. Following Gehrke and Grillo(2008) and Grillo (2008), I suggest that the type shifting required forsome predicates to passivize may play a role in the passive delay.
Page Updated: 10-Sep-2012