Children’s comprehension of verbal and adjectival passives: an analysis

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to investigate the linguistic competence of 23 Italian-speaking children aged between 3;6 and 6;5 when it comes to passive sentences, with special attention to the adjectival and verbal interpretation of passive. For this purpose, a linguistic test in Catalan (Gavarró & Parramon 2017) has been adapted to Italian, thus providing a further tool to test young children’s linguistic competence. A particular focus will be devoted to the Italian auxiliaries essere and venire, which are used in passive constructions. Since the auxiliary venire only allows an eventive passive interpretation, it turns out to be a pivotal variable in order to investigate whether young children are able to master verbal passives, and how this competence develops over time. The test presented in this study contains only passive sentences without the by-phrase. Contrary to the findings of Gavarró & Parramon (2017), the results obtained from the present study demonstrate how even 3-year-old children show high percentage of accuracy in the comprehension of verbal passives, and mostly, that it is the adjectival interpretation of passives that turns out to be problematic, especially for the youngest.