Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children's short and full passives
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Updated: May 30, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Katherine Messenger1, Holly P Branigan, Janet F McLean
1School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK. kmesseng@illinois.edu
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).
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