Functional constraints of the acquisition of the passive: toward a model of the competence to perform

Although passive constructions occur infrequently in the linguistic environment (Brown 1973), English speaking children productively use well-formed passives in their early speech (Bowerman 1983). Further, children have been shown to be sensitive to the relationship between discourse focus and the passive, in that they produce passives far more often when a non-actor is the focus of the discourse (Turner & Rommetveit 1967), and are more likely to accurately interpret passive sentences when attention has been oriented to the object of an action (Strohner & Nelson 1974). However, children are much more likely to produce a passive with prototypically transitive action verbs, and are much less likely to do so when the object argument is a location or goal (Maratsos et al. 1985; Pinker et al. 1987). In two experiments, children (3 to 11 years) and adults described intransitive, prototypically transitive, and non-prototypically transitive scenes presented in an animated film in response to a probe about one or several of the characters (e.g., 'tell me about the UNDERGOER'). The results suggest that young children do appear to have knowledge of the passive; however, the overall frequency of passive usage increased across development. In addition, passives were used more frequently when describing prototypically transitive scenes, compared with those including non-prototypical arguments (e.g., datives and locatives).