Cues for understanding the passive voice

Abstract

The use of each three passive cues: a form of the auxiliary be: the morphology of the passive participle of the verb: the case-marking preposition by, as well as the use of combinations of these cues, was investigated in two experiments involving 59 children aged between 2:9 and 5:10 (Exp. 1) and 29 college graduates (Exp. 2). In both experiments subjects were asked to interpret sentences which had either 0, 1, 2, or all 3 passive cues. The data showed that children and adults differ significantly in their interpretation of passive sentences as passive. Linguistically less advanced children do not interpret any sentence type as passive. More advanced children seem to attend particularly to the preposition by. If a sentence does not have by, it is treated as active.Even the most advanced children interpret as passive only a grammatically complete passive sentence. As for adults,they interpret only grammatical active sentences as active. Otherwise,each additional passive cue makes a sentence more likely to be interpreted as passive. Adults interpret sentences with two passive cues as passive almost as frequently as they interpret full passives as passive. For both groups the preposition by is the most powerful passive cue