Adjectival and verbal passives are understood by German 4-year-olds
Yair Haendler
Flavia Adani
University of Potsdam, Linguistics Department
Numerous studies have found a delay in the acquisition of passive sentences (e.g., The
door was closed by the woman) as compared to active sentences (e.g., The woman closed the
door). Interestingly, though, children find certain passive types harder to understand than
others (see Orfitelli, 2012 for a literature review).
This state of the art of the acquisition of passives is accounted for by the A-Chain
Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH; Borer and Wexler, 1987; 1992) and its recent development, the
Universal Phase Requirement (UPR; Wexler, 2004). According to these accounts, young
children cannot process the A(rgumental)-movement of an object into the subject position.
The ability to compute such A-movements is claimed to mature around 5 years of age
(Wexler, 2004). Given that the A-movement of the object into the subject position occurs in
verbal passives (VP; passives that describe an action, cf. (1)), but not in adjectival passives
(AP; passives that describe a state or result, cf. (2)), young children should have difficulties
understanding the former, but not the latter passive type. Consider the following examples
(the DP <The door> indicates the position of the direct object of the verb before it moves to
the subject position in the Verbal Passive):
(1) [DPi The door] was closed <DPi The door>
(2) [DPi The door] was closed
Verbal Passive
Adjectival Passive
As examples (1) and (2) show, APs and VPs are homophonous in English. That is,
they have the same phonological form although their syntactic structures differ. According to
the ACDH and UPR, when English-speaking children younger than 5 encounter a VP (1),
they will interpret it as an AP (2), given that the two sentences are homophonous and since
young children are not able to process A-chains. The ACDH and UPR further predict for
languages in which APs and VPs are not homophonous, that children younger than 5 should
understand APs well and VPs poorly, since they cannot rely on a similar phonological form of
the two passive types.
We present the results of a study that tests this prediction experimentally in German, a
language that uses different auxiliaries to form APs (sein 'be') and VPs (werden 'become'). In
order to avoid a potential influence of verb frequency on children's comprehension of
passives, novel verbs were used. Nine adults and thirty-two 4-year-old children participated.
Using a binary sentence-picture matching task, we compared the comprehension of APs (such
as Die Maus ist gebafft 'The mouse is baffed'; cf. Fig. (1a), where a mouse is wrapped with a
strip) and VPs (such as Die Maus wird gebafft 'The mouse is baffed'; cf. Fig. (1b), where a
woman wraps the mouse with a strip).
(1a)
(1b)
Figure 1: Example of visual stimuli. The picture on the left is the
target picture in the AP condition (corresponding to the AP Die
Maus ist gebafft); the picture on the right is the target picture in the
VP condition (corresponding to the VP Die Maus wird gebafft).
Whereas all the adults performed 100% correctly on both conditions, children understood APs
(M=0.8, SE=0.05) slightly more accurately than VPs (M=0.7, SE=0.06), although this
difference was not significant statistically (p=.35). On both conditions, children performed
significantly above chance level (p<.01), as shown in Fig. 2:
Figure 2: Child performance on
the binary picture-selection task.
AP=Adjectival Passive (red);
VP=Verbal Passive (blue);
Dashed line represents chance
level (0.5);
Error bars represent one standard
error
Contrary to the predictions of the ACDH and UPR, our study shows that 4-year-old
German-speaking children understand well both APs and VPs. The above-chance
performance indicates that even on the harder condition (VP) children were not merely
guessing. Thus, German-speaking 4-year-olds are able to interpret the object movement in
VPs correctly. Moreover, when looking at the individual performance it turns out that 19% of
the children (6 out of 32) performed like adults, being always correct on both conditions.
Furthermore, the results suggest that children at this age distinguish between the two readings
of German passives, as expressed by the two auxiliaries–a stative/resultative reading in APs
and an actional reading in VPs.
Given cross-linguistic contrasting findings on child comprehension of VPs, we
suggest that children might acquire passives at different ages in various languages, as
proposed by Guasti (in press).
References:
Borer, H. and Wexler, K. (1987). The Maturation of Syntax. In Roeper, T. and Williams, E.
(Eds.), Parameter setting (pp. 123-172). Dordrecht, NL: Reidel.
Borer, H. and Wexler, K. (1992). Bi-unique relations and the maturation of grammatical
principles. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 10, 147-189.
Guasti, M. T. (in press). Voice Alternation (Active, Passive, Middle). In Lidz, J., Snyder, W.
and Pater, J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Orfitelli, R. (2012). Argument intervention in the acquisition of A-movement. Los Angeles,
CA: UCLA dissertation.
Wexler, K. (2004). Theory of phasal development: Perfection in child grammar. MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics, 48, 159-209.