Mistakes weren't made: Three-year-olds' comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax.

ABSTRACT: By about age three, English-learning children begin to understand passive sentences with familiar verbs. We probed the nature of children's linguistic representations by asking whether 3-year-olds promptly extend their emerging knowledge of the passive structure to novel verbs. In three preferential-looking experiments, 3-year-olds (N = 124) interpreted novel verbs presented in short passives (Experiment 1, "She's getting snedded!") as transitive verbs, referring to causal-action rather than solo-action events, and used word-order in full passives, (Experiments 2 and 3, e.g., "She's getting snedded by the boy!"), to select a target event in which the subject was the patient, not the agent of action. Comprehension accuracy in Experiments 1 and 2 varied with vocabulary, but this vocabulary e

SUBMITTER: Messenger K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10224748 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature