Passive

Sharon Armon-Lotem

971

The syntactic abilities of children with SLI: The Passive

Van der Lely HKJ and Battell J (2003) ‘Wh-movement in children with grammatical SLI: A test of the RDDR hypothesis’, Language 79: 153-181

"SLI children have problems in handling non-local dependencies (between pairs of constituents which are not immediately adjacent) such as those involved in tense marking (which involves a T-V dependency both in the agreement-based analysis of Adger 2003 and in the Affix Hopping analysis of Radford 2004), agreement (which involves a subject-verb dependency), determining pronominal reference (which involves a pronoun-antecedent dependency), and movement (which involves a dependency between two constituents, one of which attracts the other)."

Van der Lely HKJ and Battell J (2003) ‘Wh-movement in children with grammatical SLI: A test of the RDDR hypothesis’, Language 79: 153-181

"van der Lely and her collaborators report SLI children showing problems in marking tense and agreement (van der Lely, 1997; 1998; van der Lely & Ullman, 2001), understanding passives (van der Lely & Harris, 1990) assigning thematic roles and pronominal reference to noun phrases (van der Lely, 2005a; van der Lely, 2005b) as well as producing and understanding relative clauses (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, in press; Stavrakaki, 2001; 2002)".

How do children with SLI interpret the passive?

Children with SLI consistently interpret reversible passive using SVO strategy (Bishop 1982)

Children with SLI show a mixture of correct interpretation and a reversal interpretation (Van der Lely & Harris 1990)

Children with SLI perform better on short passive than on long Passive (Van der Lely 1994)

Children with SLI adopt an adjectival interpretation (Van der Lely 1996)

Van der Lely, H. 1996. Specifically language impaired and normally developing children: Verbal passive vs. adjectival passive interpretation. Lingua, 98, 243–272.

Subjects

Method – Picture selection task

6 verbs: wash, mend, paint, eat, cut, hit

Results (p.258)

Reversal

Adjectival

Passive

p. 259

p. 260

D. V. M. Bishop, P. Bright, C. James, S. J. Bishop, and H. K. J. Van der lely. 2000. Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of developmental language impairment? Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 159–181

Subjects

Sample A - LI - 46 children out of 37 same-sex twin pairs selected for the presence of language impairment in one or both twins

Sample B - LN- 32 children out of an unselected sample of 104 twin pairs from the general population

All children were 7 - 13.

TAPS (Van der Lely 1996)

(a) reversible active SVO (e.g., “the man eats the fish”);

(b) reversible full passive (e.g., “the man is eaten by the fish”);

(c) short progressive passive (e.g., “the fish is being eaten”); and

(d) short passive with potentially adjectival passive interpretation (e.g., “the fish is eaten”).

12 items x 4 sentence types = 48 sentences

Results

There was a significant difference between groups: mean correct (out of 48) for group LI = 40.4 (SD = 3.96) and for group LN = 45.3 (SD = 2.29), F(1, 76) = 39.8, p < .001.

Age was not significantly correlated with TAPS performance, r(76) = −.047

Nonverbal ability was significantly correlated with TAPS : r(76) = .420 for Raven’s Matrices and .445 for PIQ (both p < .001

Results by sentence type

*

*

SLI Children's Delayed Acquisition of Passive

Mabel L. Rice, Kenneth Wexler, & Jennifer Francois

Paper Presented at the BU Conference on Language Development

Boston, MA, November 1-4, 2001

Subjects Study 1

19 10-year-old children 17 age-equivalent controls 16 8-year-old lexically-equivalent controls (PPVT raw

scores)

Study 2 17 5-year-old SLI children 17 age-equivalent controls 16 3-year-old lexically-equivalent controls (PPVT raw

scores)

Method

Stromswold’s 32-item task for reversible full passives, with toy animals.

Examiner: “The goal kicked the horse.”

Child: act out action with toy animals

[Verbal item set: Kiss, slap, touch, hug, kick, lick, tickle, push]

Results - Study 1Passive Comprehension

0

0.15

0.3

0.45

0.6

0.75

0.9

SLI Lexically Matched Age Matched

Per

cen

t C

orre

ct

By 10 years of age, children in the SLI group comprehended reversible full verbal passives, showing knowledge of movement (A-chains)

Results - Study 2Passive Comprehension: Identification of Agent

0

0.15

0.3

0.45

0.6

0.75

0.9

SLI Lexically Matched Age Matched

Per

cen

t C

orre

ct

At 5 years of age, children in the SLI group were below age peers in their comprehension of reversible full verbal passives, and similar to their younger lexically-equivalent peers

The Acquisition of Passive Constructions in Russian Children with SLI

Maria Babyonyshev, Lesley Hart, & Elena Grigorenko. 2005. Paper presented at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics - The Princeton Meeting

Subjects A medium-sized village (population of

approximately 900) in Arkhangelsk region where the incidence of language disorders is far greater than in the general population.

14 monolingual Russian children aged between 6;3 and 9;10 (mean age 7; 10), non-verbal IQ above 70: seven TD children (mean age 8;3 ) and seven children with SLI (mean age 7;5).

Children were grouped based on: clinical impressions, and either MLU, or syntactic complexity (the proportion of syntactically complex structures to all structures produced)

Method

A picture selection task with reversible passive sentences in the perfective form.

20 passive sentences with pairs of pictures: 10 based on actional verbs (a), 5 based on psychological predicates (b), and 5 based on perception verbs (c).

a. Petux byl oščipan gusem. ‘A rooster was plucked by a goose.’

b. Lisa byla utešena korovoj. ‘A fox was consoled by a cow.’

c. Žiraf byl obnyuxan obez’janoj. ‘A giraffe was smelled by a monkey.’

Results - percentage of success

Actional Psychological Perception Total

TD* 77% 71% 80% 76%

SLI 71% 57% 40% 56%

* Younger TD do not distinguish the three types of passives, performing at chance level on all of them (see Babyonyshev & Brun 2003).

Presentations – Production

Leonard, L. B., Wong, A. M. Y, Deevy, P., Stokes, S. F.,

and P. Fletcher .2006. The production of passives by children with specific language impairment: Acquiring English or Cantonese. Applied Psycholinguistics 27, 267–299 - Karina

Passive in BISLI

Sentence Imitation (Porat 2009) - Subjects 31 preschool children (23 bilingual English-Hebrew and 8 Hebrew-

speaking monolinguals), from same neighborhood and same (middle-high) SES, attending regular preschools or special “language preschools”.

Bilingual children were screened for both languages using standardized tests (CELF Preschool for English, Goralnik for Hebrew), monolinguals were screened for Hebrew.

The bilingual children are divided into: Children with typical development in both languages (ALL-TD). Most

attend regular school, 2 attend language preschool. This group without the latter two is called TD.

Children with Hebrew typical development (H-TD) - less than 1.5 SD on the Goralink, but more than 1 SD on the CELF.

Children with English typical development (E-TD) - less than 1 SD on the CELF, but more than 1.5 SD on the Goralnik.

Children with atypical development (A-TD) – more than 1 SD on the CELF, and more than 1.5 SD on the Goralnik.

Method

Elicited imitation tasks targeting constructions involving syntactic movement.

10 sentences in Hebrew (most of them taken from Friedmann and Lavi, 2006), including 10 short passives and 10 long passives.

70 sentences in English, including 10 short passives and 10 long passives.

Data were collected in separate sessions by native-English and native-Hebrew speaking research assistants.

Results - Children with SLI SLI: Bilingual vs. Monolingual

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Tran SV Tran VS Unerg SV Unerg VS Unacc SV Unacc VS Topicalization Short passive Long passive Sunject RCs Object RCs

Bilingual Monolingual

Results - Bilingual Children - syntactic errors

Hebrew

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

Tran SV Tran VS Unerg SV Unerg VS Unacc SV Unacc VS Topicalization Short passive Long passive Subject RCs Object RCs

ATD TD - HTD ETD