Dutch children’s comprehension of actional and psychological passives
Summary
It has been claimed that English and Dutch children have complete knowledge of the passive around the age of seven but already use passives at earlier ages. In the current study, Dutch children between four and ten years old (divided into a five-year-old group and a seven-year-old group) were tested on their comprehension of the passive using the coloring task (a new and improved alternative to picture selection). The items varied in structure (active vs. passive, truncated vs. untruncated) and verb type (actional vs. psychological). Both age groups were able to understand at least some forms of the passive. For both age groups, however, the passive was significantly harder to understand than the active, which suggests that difficulties persist even beyond the age of seven. Similar results were found for verb type: psychological verbs remained harder for both age groups than actional verbs. Strikingly, psychological passives were understood significantly better when truncated. This means the results support the much-discussed theory that children’s problems with passives lie with the by-phrase. As an additional result we can also conclude that the coloring task is a promising new method, as it was able to clearly show the effect of truncation on children’s comprehension.