The Passive in 3- and 4-Year-Olds

This paper argues that analyzing the patterns of individual subject performance in tests of comprehension of passives might give insight into how little children interpret passives: 3 and 4 year-olds seem to go through a range of passive interpretation, that varies from actual comprehension to total non-comprehension. The fact that some small children understand long and short passives in Portuguese could be seen as evidence that the concept of universal delay for passives is too stringent. We also argue that below chance results and chance results may reflect a relevant difference in children’s behavior in interpreting the passive: below chance results seem to suggest that children interpret the passive as an active sentence.