Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal be-passive English, compared acquisition other constructions object-movement such as wh-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children’s performance on these passives can affected by verb’s lexical semantics. Through a meta-analysis experimental studies assessing English-speaking age for be- passive, we...

Previous studies on Sakha have diverged whether to analyze its passives and impersonals as syntactically distinct constructions or not. In this paper, we report a novel variety of which behaves differently from those recorded in the literature with regard impersonals. We argue that variety, impersonal should be analyzed an active construction null pronoun, rather than passive construction. also...

Research into agrammatic comprehension in English has described a pattern of impaired understanding of passives and retained ability on active constructions. Some accounts of this dissociation predict that patients who are unable to comprehend actives will also be impaired in the comprehension of passives. We report the case of a man with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (WR), whose comprehens...

Differences in caregiver input across socioeconomic status (SES) predict syntactic development, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Input effects may reflect the exposure needed to acquire syntactic representations during learning (e.g., does the child have the relevant structures for passive sentences?) or access this knowledge during communication (e.g., can she use the past participl...

Although by 3or 4-years of age, children are remarkably good at understanding most sentences, many studies have shown that even 5and 6-year old children have difficulty understanding some types of sentences. The reason(s) why are unclear in large part because we know little about how children process sentences. To investigate how children process the sentences, we collected accuracy, reaction t...