Semantic restrictions on children's passives |
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| Authors: | M Maratsos D E Fox J A Becker M A Chalkley |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands;2. University of Groningen, 9712 CP Groningen, The Netherlands;1. Hacettepe University, Turkey;2. UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London, UK;1. Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada;2. Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal CHUM, Canada;3. Neurology Service, Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal, Canada;1. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands;2. International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands;3. Computer Science Department, University of Koblenz-Landau, PO Box 201 602, 56016 Koblenz, Germany;4. Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands;1. Department of English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, United Kingdom;2. Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom |
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| Abstract: | Four studies are described in which children were asked to comprehend physical action passives such as Superman was held by Batman and mental verb passives such as Goofy was liked by Donald. Over a variety of comprehension methods, including questions in response to spoken sentences alone, or in choices of different pictures, children were found to be consistently poorer in comprehending the mental verb passives. Absolute competence could not be estimated securely because of variations in level of accuracy induced by different methods. But it appeared to be a reasonable interpretation that mental verb passives are understood very poorly at an absolute level by preschool children and many early grade school children, and are not understood as well as action verb passives until well into the grade school years. This is so despite the fact that both action and mental verb passives can be described uniformly at the level of the underlying grammatical relations, subject and object. Possibilities for explaining these limitations are discussed. It is concluded that it is not likely the children lack constructs such as subject, verb, and object. Rather, the limitations on the passive seem to arise from children's active construal of input as indicating semantic conditions on the applicability of the passive. |
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