1

The syntactic abilities of children with SLI:

The Passive

2

• "SLI children have problems in handling non-local dependencies (between pairs of constituents which are not immediately adjacent) such as those involved in tense marking (which involves a T-V dependency both in the agreement-based analysis of Adger 2003 and in the Affix Hopping analysis of Radford 2004), agreement (which involves a subject-verb dependency), determining pronominal reference (which involves a pronoun-antecedent dependency), and movement (which involves a dependency between two constituents, one of which attracts the other)."

3

• "van der Lely and her collaborators report SLI children showing problems in marking tense and agreement (van der Lely, 1997; 1998; van der Lely & Ullman, 2001), understanding passives (van der Lely & Harris, 1990) assigning thematic roles and pronominal reference to noun phrases (van der Lely, 2005a; van der Lely, 2005b) as well as producing and understanding relative clauses (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, in press; Stavrakaki, 2001; 2002)".

4

Passive

Maryi was kissed ti by John

• Passive is A-movement rather than A’-movement• The subject is the patient (no necessary agent)• The transitive verb has unique morphology (with or

without an auxiliary verb) which makes it intransitive• The passive derives n-place predicate from n+1-place

predicate• Not all languages permit an agent-phrase (by phrase),

and the same agent-phase can occur with non-passive verbs

• Verbal vs. adjectival passive

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Verbal vs. adjectival

The girl is covered (by the boy)

The covered girl (*by the boy)

Ha-yalda mexusa (al yedey ha-yeled)

the-girl cover-pass (on hands the-boy)

‘The girl is covered (by the boy)’

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Issues in acquisition

• Reversible vs. non-reversible

• Actional vs. non-actional

• Adjectival vs. verbal

• Do children understand the by-phrase?

• Comprehension vs. production

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Picture selection task

How many pictures per verbs?

Lihi Koren

Naama Friedmann

TAPS

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Picture selection task - cont.

How many characters per picture?

This is crucial for facilitating the by-phrase

99

10

10

1111

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What about production?

• Elicited imitation

• Sentence completion

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References• Precious, A. & G. Conti-Ramsden. 1988. Language-impaired children's

comprehension of active versus passive sentences. British Journal of Communication Disorders 23, 3, 229-243.

• Van der Lely, H. K. J., & Harris, M. 1990. Comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language impaired children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 55, 101-117. - Sigal

• Van der Lely, H. 1996. Specifically language impaired and normally developing children: Verbal passive vs. adjectival passive interpretation. Lingua, 98, 243–272.

• D. V. M. Bishop, P. Bright, C. James, S. J. Bishop, and H. K. J. Van der lely. 2000. Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of developmental language impairment? Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 159–181

• Laurence B. Leonard, Patricia Deevy, Carol A. Miller, Leila Rauf, Monique Charest, and Robert Kurtz. 2003. Surface Forms and Grammatical Functions: Past Tense and Passive Participle Use by Children with Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Vol.46 43-55 - Julie

• Leonard, L. B., Wong, A. M. Y, Deevy, P., Stokes, S. F., and P. Fletcher .2006. The production of passives by children with specific language impairment: Acquiring English or Cantonese. Applied Psycholinguistics 27, 267–299 - Tali