Comprehension Of Passive Sentences Research Articles

THE INFLUENCE OF REVERSIBILITY AND TRUNCATION ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PASSIVE VOICE BY YOUNG CHILDREN

Reversible and non‐reversible active and passive sentences, half of which were truncated and half not, were presented to children aged between three and seven years. Comprehension of each sentence was tested by the simultaneous presentation of picture pairs, one of which showed the actor and object in the same roles and the other in the opposite roles to that described by the sentence. Selection of the pictures which the children considered to match the sentences confirmed the prediction that children whose comprehension of passive sentences was imperfect were aided not only by non‐reversibility but also by agent‐deletion. The most difficult type of passive to comprehend was one which was reversible and contained an agent. Non‐reversibility was also found to aid comprehension of active sentences by the younger subjects.

Reversing Irreversible Sentences: Semantic and Syntactic Factors

Active and passive sentences were presented with probable and improbable semantic content to 100 first graders and 100 kindergarteners. An “irreversible” sentence was considered probable and its reverse was considered improbable. In a design employing syntax, probability, grade, and sex as factors, probability and syntax were found significant both as main effects and in their interaction. Probability had little effect on the comprehension of active sentences, but strongly affected comprehension of passive sentences. First graders responded correctly more often than kindergarteners; the difference was greatest on improbable sentences, with improbable passive sentences the most difficult. Sex differences were not found. The greater difficulty in comprehending less familiar sentences when syntactic form is not supported by semantic content suggests that the semantic component of grammar may play an important role in the child's acquisition of syntactic comprehension.

Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children

Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called "wrong". Performance on the judgment task was correlated with each child's mean length of utterance and with his comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences. Only the linguistically most advanced children were able to make a significant number of appropriate judgments and corrections of reversed word order imperatives. Less developed children could appropriately judge and correct semantically anomalous but not incorrect word order imperatives. The importance of semantic as opposed to syntactic factors in children's judgments of the acceptability of sentences is stressed.

On the comprehension of active and passive sentences

In a series of five experiments the ease of processing active and passive sentences was shown to be a function of the prior coding of a perceptual event. When the event was coded in terms of the actor, active sentences were more easily verified, when the event was coded in terms of the receiver of the action, passive sentences were more easily verified. This same pattern was shown to hold for answering active and passive questions. From this it was inferred that a passive sentence can be comprehended directly in the logical object-verb-logical subject word order without recovering its active sentence equivalent base structure. A processing model for the verification of active and passive sentences was proposed in terms of a series of binary comparison operations each of which requires additional time; this model was shown to account for about 90% of the variance in the time Ss required to verify these sentences.

Children's dependence upon visual context in sentence comprehension

This study explored the manner in which young children utilize meaning clues implicit in nonlinguistic aspects of context to aid comprehension of difficult sentences. Comprehension of reversible passive sentences was measured for the degree to which visual context could be helpful to sentence understanding. Results indicated a strong reliance on visual cues by children from three to seven years of age. The use of visual aids as a means of helping children develop comprehension strategies is suggested.

The comprehension of active and passive sentences as a function of pragmatic expectations

Active and passive reversible sentences were presented to 48 Ss. When the sentences were not reversed, the relation between the logical subject (LS) and the logical object (LO) was pragmatically expected; when they were reversed, it was contrary to expectation. Subjects' task was to extract LS and LO. When response latencies were calculated, it was found that there was a significant reversal but no voice effect. In a second experiment, sentences were again reversible, but the relation between LS and LO was equally expected when sentences were reversed as when they were not. A significant voice but no reversal effect was found. It was concluded that pragmatic expectations are an important cue to comprehension; that they are independent of grammatical order; and that the perceptual prominence of cues in a sentence determines which strategy is employed in comprehension.

Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood

Children and adults verified sentences of four grammatical types—“kernel,” passive, negative, and passive negative—with respect to pictures. The pictures presented situations which were either reversible, in that the object of action could also serve as the subject, or nonreversible, in that the object could not normally serve as the subject. Chomsky's syntactic competence model correctly predicted that passives would take more time to evaluate than kernels, and passive negatives more time than negatives; but semantic and psychological factors are required to explain the finding that syntactically simple negatives took more time than relatively more complex passives. Making sentences nonreversible largely washed out the difference in syntactic complexity between active and passive sentences, making passives about as easy as kernels, and passive negatives about as easy as negatives. It is argued that nonreversibility facilitates comprehension of passive (both affirmative and negative) sentences in that, although the normal subject-object order is reversed, it is still clear which of the two nouns is subject and which object. The syntactic theory also does not account for an obtained interaction between truth value and affirmation-negation. All of the factors considered—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—are important in accounting for the performance of S s as young as six.