The passive sentence production in preschoolers: Syntactic priming and abstract linguistic representation.

Abstract

The production of the passive voice in a group of preschoolers, aged from 4;3 to 5;11, has been observed during both sentence repetition and picture description tasks, using a priming methodology. To carry out this study, each child was asked to describe a target picture, in the absence of particular indications, after having listened to the experimenter's description of a priming image through the elicitation of either an active or passive sentence. The aim of this analysis was to understand whether one previous syntactic structure influences the production of a successive structure of the same type, out of lexical items and within different semantic contexts and, at the same time, whether preschoolers master a complex syntactic structure such as the passive sentence. The repetition of the priming syntactic structure demonstrates that syntactic priming effect occurred. Priming phenomenon suggests that children's linguistic production is driven by an abstract representation of the syntax.