A large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of the acquisition of passive

Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; López, Kristine Jensen de; Smoczyńska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbiński, Marcin; Hout, Angeliek van; Dabašinskiené, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Leesik, Reeli Torn; Lely, Heather van der

doi:10.1080/10489223.2015.1047095

Cited by 42 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(39 reference statements)

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“…The results of all three experiments are predicted by our main hypothesis that children's more limited cognitive resources make brevity more important for them. 16 The comprehension of full passive sentences has been found to be more difficult than that of short passives in 5-year-old children (Armon-Lotem et al 2016). Therefore, it is plausible that the production of a full passive is cognitively more demanding for children than the production of a short passive.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to be Brief: Children’s and Adults’ Application of Grice’s Brevity Maxim in Production

Yatsushiro

Sauerland

2019

Languages

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The brevity maxim of Gricean pragmatics states that unnecessary prolixity should be avoided. We report a case in which 5-year-old children’s performance conforms better to Grice’s maxim than adults’ behavior. Our data come from a semi-spontaneous German relative clause production study that we carried out with 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults. In particular, we focus on the pragmatics of the passive predicates that were produced. These constituted about a third of both child and adult productions in items that targeted an object relative clause structure. Since the expression of the agent is syntactically optional with passive predicates, the brevity maxim predicts that the agent should only be expressed when it is informative. We compare two conditions to test this prediction: one where the agent is informative and one where it is not. We find that 5-year-old children display significantly greater sensitivity to the brevity maxim than adults do. In two follow-up studies, we show that adults’ violations of brevity cannot be explained by priming of by-phrases expressing the agent and that there is an effect of age within children as well.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to be Brief: Children’s and Adults’ Application of Grice’s Brevity Maxim in Production

Yatsushiro

Sauerland

2019

Languages

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“…The passive occupies a special place in investigations of children’s language acquisition, across languages as varied as Sesostho (Demuth, 1989) and Spanish (Pierce, 1992), Inuktitut (Allen & Crago, 1996), Indonesian (Aryawibawa & Ambridge, 2018), German (Abbot‐Smith & Behrens, 2006), and Greek (Tsimpli, 2006). The reason for the passive’s status as something of a test‐bed for theories of acquisition research is that, due to its low frequency in many languages (but see Demuth, Moloi, & Machobane, 2010; Kline & Demuth, 2010) and noncanonical ordering of semantic roles, the passive is one of very few sentence‐level constructions for which children (and even adults; Dabrowska & Street, 2006) make errors, in both comprehension and production (e.g., Fox & Grodzinsky, 1998; Gordon & Chafetz, 1990; Hirsch & Wexler, 2006; Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkey, 1985; Meints, 1999; Pinker, Lebeaux, & Frost, 1987; Sudhalter & Braine, 1985), a finding that holds across languages including Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish (Armon‐Lotem et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive

et al. 2020

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All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children’s and adults’ performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced‐choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.e., fewer correct points/longer reaction time) was greater for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient and theme‐experiencer verbs (e.g., Bob was seen/hit/frightened by Wendy). Similarly, in a production/priming study (Experiment 2), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) produced fewer passives for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer verbs. We conclude that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics‐free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account.

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“…The materials used in this study consisted of the Danish version of the passive comprehension experiments developed by Armon-Lotem et al (2016) and originally used to explore passive comprehension of TD 5-yearold speakers of eleven different languages under the auspices of COST Action A33. The experiments test the comprehension of short and long periphrastic passive sentences as well as comprehension of active sentences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A gradual emergence of children's passive comprehension was identified, for example, for periphrastic passives 3-year-olds performed at chance level, 4-year-olds with 60% accuracy, and 5-year-olds with 75% accuracy. Danish-speaking children's comprehension of passives was again tested as part of a cross-linguistic study by Armon-Lotem et al (2016). In this study, Danish 5-year-olds performed nearly at ceiling in the comprehension of short and long periphrastic passives.…”

Section: Passive Acquisition Among Typically Developing Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Successful passive sentence comprehension among Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

López

Schroeder

Gavarró

2018

Autism & Developmental Language Impairments

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Background and aims: Language abilities vary greatly across children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we investigate passive sentence comprehension, which has been underexplored among individuals with autism spectrum disorders and found to be delayed among other clinical populations. This study is the first to assess grammatical comprehension among Danish-speaking adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Methods: Fifteen Danish-speaking adolescents with autism (mean age: 14.9 years; age range: 13-18 years) participated in a picture selection task assessing comprehension of passive sentences relative to active sentences. We compared our findings for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders to those of 15 typically developing Danish-speaking adolescents matched for age and nonverbal reasoning as measured by the Matrix subtest of the WISC-IV/WAIS-IV. We also analyzed associations between passive comprehension and nonverbal reasoning. Results: The results showed ceiling effects for both groups on all sentence types indicating that Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders do not face problems comprehending passive sentences. However, when considering variation within the autism spectrum disorder group, correct passive comprehension was highly significantly associated with nonverbal reasoning for the autism spectrum disorder group (r ¼.75), while this was not the case for the typically developing adolescents. Analyses of the few errors produced showed a preference for Theta-role reversal errors in the autism spectrum disorder and the typically developing groups. Conclusions: Danish-speaking adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders do not show impairment in passive sentence comprehension. Correlation analyses however show that for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, passive sentence comprehension is associated with nonverbal reasoning. We discuss how these results can be viewed as consistent with the few previous studies on passive comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Implications: Our study provides additional cross-linguistic evidence that passive comprehension is not problematic for individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. The finding of the relationship between nonverbal reasoning and passive sentence comprehension may inform clinical best practices as children with autism spectrum disorders who underperform in measures of nonverbal reasoning may benefit from additional receptive language screening.

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A large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of the acquisition of passive

Cited by 42 publications

References 32 publications

How to be Brief: Children’s and Adults’ Application of Grice’s Brevity Maxim in Production

How to be Brief: Children’s and Adults’ Application of Grice’s Brevity Maxim in Production

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive

Successful passive sentence comprehension among Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

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