23.3787, Diss: Language Acquisition/ English/ Sotho, Southern: Crawford: 'Developmental Perspectives...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-3787. Mon Sep 10 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.3787, Diss: Language Acquisition/ English/ Sotho, Southern: Crawford: 'Developmental Perspectives...'

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Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:00:10
From: Jean Crawford [jeaninmali at hotmail.com]
Subject: Developmental Perspectives on the Acquisition of the Passive

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Institution: University of Connecticut 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Jean Crawford

Dissertation Title: Developmental Perspectives on the Acquisition of the Passive 

Dissertation URL:  http://jeanerz.com/Crawford2012Dissertation.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Sotho, Southern (sot)


Dissertation Director(s):
William Snyder
Maria Polinsky
Diane Lillo-Martin

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the passive. The 
apparent cross-linguistic delay of the verbal passive compared to other 
constructions suggests children's knowledge is somehow restricted, 
leading some to propose the difficulty arises because of syntactic 
maturation (Wexler 2004, Orfitelli 2012) or because of a heavy reliance 
on discourse features assigned to arguments (Snyder and Hyams 
2008). These hypotheses predict that until relevant mechanisms 
mature, children will only produce and comprehend a subset of 
passives (i.e., adjectival), or will only show adult-like performance when 
felicity conditions are met. Others have suggested children have not 
overcome the poverty of the stimulus for passives, arguing that 
frequency of passive in the input determines the timing of acquisition 
(Kline and Demuth 2010). The prediction of this account is that passive 
production and comprehension will vary cross-linguistically as a 
function of the primary linguistic data.


I argue against both the maturation and frequency accounts with data 
from English and Sesotho. In the Sesotho study, I show that 4-6 year 
old Sesotho-speaking children perform adult-like on certain types of 
unambiguously verbal passives. Furthermore, I show that Sesotho-
speaking children perform no better on any type of passive than their 
English-speaking counterparts, although the frequency of passives in 
Sesotho child directed speech is ten times greater than in English.


The English study, a targeted grammaticality judgment task where 
felicity conditions are met, shows that 4-6 year-old English-speaking 
children accept passives with purpose phrases as grammatical, 
indicating they have verbal passive syntax. This result further provides 
evidence against frequency as the main source of passive acquisition 
delay, since passives are less than 1% of all English child directed 
speech. The results add to growing evidence that English-speaking 
children have knowledge of verbal passives when felicity conditions are 
met, though felicity might not be the sole factor.


The overall results indicate children have adult-like knowledge of 
verbal passives in most cases, though the source of non-adult-like 
performance requires further explanation. Following Gehrke and Grillo 
(2008) and Grillo (2008), I suggest that the type shifting required for 
some predicates to passivize may play a role in the passive delay. 






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