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Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives
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Messenger, Katherine, Branigan, Holly P. and Mclean, Janet F. (2012) Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives. Journal of Child Language, 39 (5). pp. 991-1016. doi:10.1017/S0305000911000377 ISSN 0305-0009.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000911000377
Abstract
We report a syntactic priming experiment that examined whether children's acquisition of the passive is a staged process, with acquisition of constituent structure preceding acquisition of thematic role mappings. Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds described transitive actions after hearing active and passive prime descriptions involving the same or different thematic roles. Both groups showed a strong tendency to reuse in their own description the syntactic structure they had just heard, including well-formed passives after passive primes, irrespective of whether thematic roles were repeated between prime and target. However, following passive primes, six-year-olds but not nine-year-olds also produced reversed passives, with well-formed constituent structure but incorrect thematic role mappings. These results suggest that by six, children have mastered the constituent structure of the passive; however, they have not yet mastered the non-canonical thematic role mapping. By nine, children have mastered both the syntactic and thematic dimensions of this structure.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Child Language | ||||||||||
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||||||||
ISSN: | 0305-0009 | ||||||||||
Official Date: | November 2012 | ||||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 39 | ||||||||||
Number: | 5 | ||||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 991-1016 | ||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1017/S0305000911000377 | ||||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||||
Adapted As: |
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