title: Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children's short and full passives.
abstract: In a syntactic priming paradigm, three- and four-year-old children and adults described transitive events after hearing thematically and lexically unrelated active and short passive prime descriptions. Both groups were more likely to produce full passive descriptions (the king is being scratched by the tiger) following short passive primes (the girls are being shocked) than active primes (the sheep is shocking the girl). These results suggest that by four, children have (shared) abstract syntactic representations for both short and full passives, contrary to previous proposals (e.g., Horgan, 1978).
authors.affiliation: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK. kmesseng@illinois.edu
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Messenger
authors.forename: Holly P
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Branigan
authors.forename: Janet F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: McLean
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology