title: Children's assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences.
abstract: Children's difficulty understanding passives in English has been attributed to the syntactic complexity, overall frequency, cue reliability, and/or incremental processing of this construction. To understand the role of these factors, we used the visual-world paradigm to examine comprehension in Mandarin Chinese where passives are infrequent but signaled by a highly valid marker (BEI). Eye-movements during sentences indicated that these markers triggered incremental role assignments in adults and 5-year-olds. Actions after sentences indicated that passives were often misinterpreted as actives when markers appearedafterthe referential noun ("Seal BEI it eat" → The seal is eaten by it). However, they were more likely to be interpreted correctly when markers appearedbefore("It BEI seal eat" → It is eaten by the seal). The actions and the eye-movements suggest that for both adults and children, interpretations of passive are easier when they do not require revision of an earlier role assignment.
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States.
authors.forename: Yi Ting
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Peking University, Beijing China.
authors.forename: Xiaobei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: Peking University, Beijing China.
authors.forename: Xiangzhi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.affiliation: Harvard University, Cambridge MA, United States.
authors.forename: Jesse
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Snedeker
keywords: Eye-tracking; Language development; Mandarin; Passives; Role assignment