The acquisition of the passive

9 Abril 2021, 14:00 • Ana Lúcia da Silva Dias Gonçalves Santos

Classic studies and well-known facts concerning the acquisition of the passive (the contrast between short and long passives and the contrast between actional and non-actional passives).

Different types of explanation for the difficulty with passives: frequency effects; syntactic complexity; cue-based accounts and incremental processing accounts.

(i) Frequency effects (Demuth, 1898, Gordon & Chafetz, 1990) and recently explored priming effects (Bencini & Valian, 2008); 

(ii) Syntactic complexity explanations: A-Chain deficit hypothesis (Borer & Wexler, 1987) (to be continued).

 

(The same topic will be explored in the next class, considering other approaches to the acquisition of the passive.)