Acquisition Of Action Passives And Psychological Passives By Mandarin-speaking Children

Studieshaveprovedthatchildrenacquirepassiveslaterthanactives,andforkidsaged4to5,theyare much weaker in understanding passives with psychological verbs than that with action verbs(Maratsos et al.,1985; Xu&Yang,2008). Borer and Wexler (1987) proposed Adjectival Strategy,stating that English-speaking children regard short passives with action verbs as the homophonousadjectival structures which lack the A-chain, which makes it easier to interpret actional passives thanpsychologicalpassives.The current studies about Mandarin passive acquisition mainly focus on action verbs (Zhu,1982;Zhou,1997; Liu&Ning,2009). There is little relevant research on mental verbs. The present studyattempts to adopt controlled experiments so as to make a systematic comparison between Mandarinactional passive comprehension and psychological passive comprehension, and analyze thediscrepancy between them from a new perspective of the application of Adjectival Strategy inMandarin passive acquisition. In Experiment One, there were three age groups (4;5;6). Each groupcovered20subjects. The method was picture identification. There were10action verbs and10psychological verbs in the test. Sentence patterns involved were actives, short passives and longpassives. In addition of three groups of children, a group of20adults also participated in ExperimentTwo. Three types of verbs were adopted in the test: achievement verbs, destructive verbs and creativeverbs.Eachtypehad8verbs.Testitemswereactivesandapairofshortpassives:aneventpassiveanda state passive. Subjects were provided with4pictures for each sentence item. One pair of picturesdenotedthecorrectagentreadings,oneforcorrectagenteventconditionandtheotherforcorrectagentstatecondition.Theotherpairofpicturesdenotedtheoppositeorincorrectagentreadings.Results indicated that all the three age groups had no much troublewith actives with action verbsor mental verbs. Children performed much better in actional passives than psychological passives.Furthermore, Chinese actional short passive comprehension seemed easier than actional long passiveunderstanding. Besides, six-year-olds as well as the adult group could discern the differences betweenevent passives and state passives while the younger subjects were more inclined to interpret the eventpassives with the similar adjectival stative readings, which, in some way, could prove that AdjectivalStrategy was applied in passive acquisition by immature Mandarin-speaking children. The applicationof Adjectival Strategy also provided a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy between acionalpassiveandpsychologicalpassivecomprehensioninMandarin.