Mistakes weren’t made: Three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax

Abstract

By about age three, English-learning children begin to understand passive sentences with familiar verbs. We probed the nature of children's linguistic representations by asking whether 3-year-olds promptly extend their emerging knowledge of the passive structure to novel verbs. In three preferential-looking experiments, 3-year-olds (N = 124) interpreted novel verbs presented in short passives (Experiment 1, "She's getting snedded!") as transitive verbs, referring to causal-action rather than solo-action events, and used word-order in full passives, (Experiments 2 and 3, e.g., "She's getting snedded by the boy!"), to select a target event in which the subject was the patient, not the agent of action. Comprehension accuracy in Experiments 1 and 2 varied with vocabulary, but this vocabulary effect disappeared when children were given more time and more repetitions of the test sentences (Experiment 3). These findings support early-abstraction accounts of acquisition: 3-year-olds represent passive syntax in abstract terms, permitting extension to novel verbs. This, in turn, allows them to use passive sentences to identify the grammatical subcategory and meaning of an unknown verb.

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

“…With regard to the English passive, an increasing number of studies have provided evidence that children’s knowledge of the passive is fully abstract from as young as 3 to 4 years (Bencini & Valian, 2008; Brooks & Tomasello, 1999; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, & Shimpi, 2004; Messenger, Branigan, & McLean, 2011a, 2011b; Messenger, Branigan, McLean, & Sorace, 2012; Messenger & Fisher, 2018), counter to older findings (e.g., Maratsos et al, 1985; Meints, 1999; Savage, Lieven, Theakston, & Tomasello, 2003, 2006; Sudhalter & Braine, 1985). Exactly what is meant by “abstract” is not always made explicit, and it varies somewhat from theory to theory.…”

Knowing how you know: Toddlers re-evaluate words learnt from an unreliable speaker

“…After watching the video, participants were tested using a preferential looking procedure, in which they saw two objects on screen and heard the novel speaker name one of the objects. We chose looking time as a measure to minimize task demands which has been successfully used in word learning paradigms at this age range (e.g., Naigles, 1990;Yuan and Fisher, 2009;Messenger and Fisher, 2018). Participants were administrated a total of 16 trials: 8 familiar word trials and 8 novel word trials, 4 per novel word.…”

“…We inspected the time course of eye movements from the onset of the first occurrence of the target word ("Look at the [target]") until the end of the trial (4 seconds). We assessed familiar and novel word comprehension as a preference for the matching object similarly to previous studies using the same teaching and testing phases (Dautriche et al, 2018(Dautriche et al, , 2015 and following other research demonstrating a preference for the matching object during novel word comprehension in this age range (e.g., Yuan and Fisher, 2009;Messenger and Fisher, 2018). Since we did not expect any learning difference between the specific novel words being tested ("danu" or "modi"), we compared participants' behaviour across conditions (reliable vs. unreliable) collapsing looking behaviour for all test trials.…”

Within and Across Language Predictors of Word Learning Processes in Dual Language Learners

“…Successful comprehension of passive syntactic constructions requires children to revise role assignments to determine who did what to whom. Children’s ability to understand passives emerges throughout the preschool years (Baldie, 1976; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973; Deen, 2011; Huang, Zheng, Meng, & Snedeker, 2013; Messenger & Fisher, 2018) and may be an important indicator, along with other noncanonical constructions, of overall language development in monolingual children (Leech, Rowe, & Huang, 2016).…”