title: Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives.
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. ktmesseng@gmail.com
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: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child; D060865:Repetition Priming; D012660:Semantics