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Acquisition of passives: the role of patient animacy, salience, and lexical accessibility*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Henrietta Lempert
Henrietta Lempert*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Psychology Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, CanadaM5S 1A1
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Abstract

In full passive sentences such as The cat was kicked by the dog, the patient (cat) is promoted to subject and the agent is demoted to the by-phrase. Children 2;10 to 4;7 years (mean 3;6) who were taught the form with animate patients and animate agents (The baby is being picked up by the girl) were better able to produce and comprehend passives than children taught with inanimate patients and animate agents (The flower is being picked up by the girl). The finding of comparable post-teaching performance in children taught with perceptually salient (coloured) VS. nonsalient patients argues against a salience explanation for the patient animacy effect. Moreover, equal access to word forms for animate and inanimate nouns did not reduce the effect. The animacy effect is consistent with claims that ‘perspective’ is the cognitive counterpart to the formal category of subject; and, conversely, inconsistent with attempts to understand language acquisition in terms of a language system that operates in isolation from other facets of human cognition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 677 - 696
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant No. 410–85–0068. Parts of this paper were presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, October 1988 and the Society for Research in Child Development Conference, April 1989. I am indebted to the staff of the following childhood education centers for their assistance: Ryerson Polytechnical Institute Early Learning Center, George Brown College Early Learning Center, Seneca College Early Learning Center, Shaughnessy Children's Center, and Campus Co-op Day Care Center. Thanks go to the children and their parents, and to Rosa Villani and Rochelle Muller for their help with data collection.

References

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