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On the production of passives in Italian : evidence from an elicited production task and a syntactic priming study with preschool children
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Manetti, Claudia |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | We present a study exploring the production of passives with Italian-speaking children, under priming and non-priming conditions. First, we will report the results from an elicited production task (Exp. 1), in which 3and 4-year-olds exhibited a strong preference for pronominalised structures (e.g. La mucca lo lecca ‘the cow him.Cl licks ) to answer patient-oriented questions and produced no passives, in contrast to adult controls who opted for periphrastic passives under the same experimental condition. Then, two further groups of 3and 4-year-olds (3;6 to 4;6) participated in a syntactic priming study (Exp. 2 and 3) in which they were first exposed to active and passive sentences in the prime and then described unrelated transitive actions. Results showed significant syntactic priming effect for active and passive sentences, both with verbal passive morphology (Exp. 2: passive auxiliary venire ‘to come’) and copular passive morphology (Exp. 3: passive auxiliary essere ‘to be’). Taken together, our results indicate that Italian children preferentially use pronominalised structures to topicalise the patient in spontaneous production, in contrast to adults’ use of passives. However, the syntactic priming study revealed that, under appropriate experimental conditions, Italian-speaking children can master long verbal passive syntax by age four, as previously found in English (e.g. Bencini and Valian 2008). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.bu.edu/bucld/files/2013/06/Manetti.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
