Learning to produce passive utterances through discourse

Two studies of English-speaking children's acquisition of the passive construction are reported. In the first study children at 3.0 and 3.5 years of age were taught to produce full passive utterances with a nonce verb through rich discourse interaction. All the older children learned to produce a passive with the nonce verb, whereas only two-thirds of the younger children learned to do this - and they needed three times as many adult utterances to do so. In the second study, also using a nonce verb, some 3.0-year-old children were given rich discourse interactions containing truncated passives, passive questions, and by phrases - all of which added up to a full passive - but they never heard a full passive utterance as a whole. Other children were given only models of full passive utterances with no discourse scaffolding. Only children who heard full passive utterances produced them. The children who participated in rich discourse interactions produced truncated passives (as they had heard). These results demonstrate that children can learn to produce full passive sentences with a nonce verb at 3 years of age, but, in accordance with Tomasello's (1992) verb island hypothesis, they tend to do so only within the syntactic constructions in which they have heard adults using that verb. © Alpha Academic.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience