Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children’s short and full passives

Messenger, Katherine and Branigan, Holly P. and McLean, Janet F. (2011) Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children’s short and full passives. Cognition, 121 (2). pp. 268-274. ISSN 0010-0277

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Abstract

In a syntactic priming paradigm, three- and four-year-old children and adults described transitive events after hearing thematically and lexically unrelated active and short passive prime descriptions. Both groups were more likely to produce full passive descriptions (the king is being scratched by the tiger) following short passive primes (the girls are being shocked) than active primes (the sheep is shocking the girl). These results suggest that by four, children have (shared) abstract syntactic representations for both short and full passives, contrary to previous proposals (e.g., Horgan, 1978).

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Cognition
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310
Subjects:
?? linguistics and languagecognitive neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psychologylanguage and linguistics ??
ID Code:
185696
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
03 Feb 2023 15:35
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 23:31