The acquisition of passive sentences in Italian preschoolers: a study on production and comprehension

Abstract

The present research aims to assess the comprehension and production of passive sentences in Italian preschoolers. The state of the art concerning language acquisition demonstrates that passive sentences are particularly complex to process. Although scholars agree on the fact that this structure undergoes a delayed linguistic development in children, the explanations that justify such phenomenon do not converge. Indeed, cross-linguistic studies have reported a range of different ages at which the passive would be mastered by children, as well as multifold syntactic accounts that support such findings. Non-canonical order and long-distance dependency seem to be among the main causes of hindering. The purpose of the present work is to contribute to the rich debate on passive sentences acquisition. In particular, some Italian-specific variables are here investigated. In order to do so, 37 monolingual and typically developing children (3;3-6;5) were assessed. In total, five tests were carried out. The first one verified child’s grammatical comprehension (Test di Comprensione Grammaticale per Bambini, TCGB), which included some passive sentences. The second experiment consisted in a comprehension picture matching task that focused on the adjectival and verbal interpretation of passive. For this test, Gavarró and Parramon’s (2017) Catalan materials were adapted to Italian. In the third place, Volpato, Verin and Cardinaletti’s (2015) comprehension and elicited production experiments were replicated, in order to control some Italian-specific variables. Namely, auxiliary type (essere “to be” vs. venire “to come”) and presence or absence of the by-phrase. Lastly, a digit span task (TEMA) was included in the study to monitor the role of memory.