The processing of passive sentences in German
Evidence from an eye-tracking study with seven- and ten-year-olds and adults
This study examines the processing and interpretation of passive sentences in German-speaking seven-year-olds,
ten-year-olds, and adults. This structure is often assumed to be particularly difficult to understand, and not yet fully mastered
in primary school (
Kemp, Bredel, & Reich, 2008), i.e. in children aged between six
and eleven. Few studies provide empirical data concerning this age range; it is therefore unknown whether this assumption is
warranted. Against this background, we tested whether the three age groups differed in their off-line comprehension of passive
sentences. In addition, we employed Visual World eye-tracking to measure processing difficulties that may differ between age
groups and may not be reflected in the final interpretations. Previous studies on adult language processing in German and English
have documented a preference to interpret sentences according to an
agent-first strategy. Our results show that
all three groups make use of this strategy, and that all of them are able to revise this interpretation once the first cue
indicating a passive sentence is encountered (the auxiliary verb form
wurde). We conclude that at least from age
seven on, children have the linguistic and cognitive prerequisites to process the passive morphosyntax of German and to revise
initial sentence misinterpretations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The agent-first strategy: Theoretical accounts
- 1.2Acquisition of passives: Evidence from off-line comprehension studies
- 1.3On-line processing of passive sentences in children
- 1.4Off-line and on-line comprehension of passive sentences in adults
- 2.The current study
- 2.1Research questions and predictions
- 2.2Participants
- 2.3Materials
- 2.4Procedure
- 2.5Analyses of the eye-tracking data
- 2.6Statistical analysis
- Off-line data
- On-line data
- 3.Results
- 3.1Accuracy
- 3.2Eye movement data
- 4.General discussion
-
Implications for a language processing model
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
-
References
References (60)
References
Abbot-Smith, K., & Behrens, H. (2006). How known constructions influence the acquisition of other constructions: The German passive and future constructions. Cognitive Science, 30(6), 995–1026.
Abbot-Smith, K., Chang, F., Rowland, C., Ferguson, H., Pine, J. (2017). Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis. PLoS ONE, 12(10): e0186129.
Adani, F., & Fritzsche, T. (2015). On the relation between implicit and explicit measures of child language development: Evidence from relative clause processing in 4-year-olds and adults. In E. Grillo & K. Jepson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (Vol. 11, pp. 14–26). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Aschermann, E., Gülzow, I., & Wendt, D. (2004). Differences in the comprehension of passive voice in German- and English-speaking children. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 63(4), 235–245.
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278.
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1).
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the Competition Model. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The Crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Becker, T. (2006). Erwerb und Verarbeitung komplexer grammatischer Strukturen bei Grundschulkindern. In T. Becker & C. Peschel (Eds.), Diskussionsforum Deutsch: Bd. 20. Gesteuerter und ungesteuerter Grammatikerwerb (pp. 156–173). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley.
Brinker, K. (1971). Das Passiv im heutigen Deutsch. Form und Funktion. Heutiges Deutsch Reihe 1: Vol. 2. München/Düsseldorf: Hueber/Schwann.
Choi, Y., & Trueswell, J. C. (2010). Children’s (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: Evidence for developing control in sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 106(1), 41–61.
Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. F., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42(4), 368–407.
Christianson, K., Luke, S. G., & Ferreira, F. (2010). Effects of plausibility on structural priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(2), 538–544.
Dąbrowska, E., & Street, J. (2006). Individual differences in language attainment: Comprehension of passive sentences by native and non-native English speakers. Language Sciences, 28(6), 604–615.
Davidson, M. C., Amso, D., Anderson, L. C., & Diamond, A. (2006). Development of cognitive control and executive functions from 4 to 13 years: Evidence from manipulations of memory, inhibition, and task switching. Neuropsychologia, 44(11), 2037–2078.
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Young German children’s early syntactic competence: A preferential looking study. Developmental Science, 11(4), 575–582.
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Familiar verbs are not always easier than novel verbs: How German pre-school children comprehend active and passive sentences. Cognitive Science, 38(1), 128–151.
Eisenberg, P. (2013). Der Satz (4., aktualisierte und überarb. Aufl.). Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik: Bd. 2. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Ferreira, F. (2003). The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 164–203.
Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferraro, V. (2002). Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(1), 11–15.
Ferreira, F., & Patson, N. D. (2007). The good enough approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(1–2), 71–83.
Friedmann, N., & Novogrodsky, R. (2004). The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: A study of SLI and normal development. Journal of Child Language, 31(3), 661–681.
Fritzenschaft, A. (1994). Activating passives in child grammar. In R. Tracy & E. Lattey (Eds.), Linguistische Arbeiten: Vol. 309. How tolerant is universal grammar?: Essays on language learnability and language variation (pp. 155–184). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Gogolin, I., & Lange, I. (2011). Bildungssprache und Durchgängige Sprachbildung. In S. Fürstenau & M. Gomolla (Eds.), Migration und schulischer Wandel: Mehrsprachigkeit (pp. 107–127). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Grillo, N., Alexiadou, A., Gehrke, B., Hirsch, N., Paolazzi, C., & Santi, A. (2019). Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German. Journal of Linguistics, 551, 523–562.
Grimm, H. (1975). Verstehen, Imitation und Produktion von Passivsätzen. In H. Grimm, Scholer, H., & M. Wintermantel (Eds.), Zur Entwicklung sprachlicher Strukturformen bei Kindern (pp. 73–99). Heinheim: J Beltz Verlag.
Hartshorne, J. K., & Germine, L. T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the lifespan. Psychological Science, 26(4), 433–443.
Huang, Y., Gerard, J., Hsu, N., Kowalski, A., & Novick, J. (2016). Cognitive-control effects on the kindergarten path: Separating correlation from causation. Poster presented at the 29th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 3–5, 2016, Gainesville, FL.
Huang, Y. T., Zheng, X., Meng, X., & Snedeker, J. (2013). Children’s assignment of grammatical roles in the on-line processing of Mandarin passive sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(4), 589–606.
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434–446.
Järvikivi, J., Pyykkönen-Klauck, P., Schimke, S., Colonna, S., & Hemforth, B. (2013). Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: Tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(7), 877–892.
Kamide, Y., Scheepers, C., & Altmann, G. T. M. (2003). Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: Cross-linguistic evidence from German and English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(1), 37–55.
Karimi, H., & Ferreira, F. (2016). Good-enough linguistic representations and on-line cognitive equilibrium in language processing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(5), 1013–1040.
Kemp, K., Bredel, U., & Reich, H. H. (2008). Morphologisch-syntaktische Basisqualifikation. In K. Ehlich, U. Bredel, & H. H. Reich (Eds), Referenzrahmen zur altersspezifischen Sprachaneignung – Forschungsgrundlagen (pp. 63–82). Bonn/Berlin: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung.
Kidd, E., Stewart, A. J., & Serratrice, L. (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery. Journal of Child Language, 38(1), 222–234.
Klein, W., & Perdue, C. (1997). The Basic Variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301–347.
Knoeferle, P., Crocker, M. W., Scheepers, C., & Pickering, M. J. (2005). The influence of the immediate visual context on incremental thematic role-assignment: Evidence from eye-movements in depicted events. Cognition, 95(1), 95–127.
Maratsos, M. P. (1974). Children who get worse at understanding the passive: a replication of Bever. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,
3
1), 65–74.
Marinis, T. (2007). On-line processing of passives in L1 and L2 children. In A. Belikova, L. Meroni, & M. Umeda (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (pp. 265–276). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Marinis, T., & Saddy, D. (2013). Parsing the Passive: Comparing children with specific language impairment to sequential bilingual children. Language Acquisition, 20(2), 155–179.
Matin, E., Shao, K. C., & Boff, K. R. (1993). Saccadic overhead: Information-processing time with and without saccades. Perception & Psychophysics, 53(4), 372–380.
Mills, A. E. (1977). Parallel studies in first and second language acquisition. Ludwigsburg: R. O. U. Strauch Ludwigsburg.
Mills, A. E. (1985). The acquisition of German. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition (pp. 141–254). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates.
Novick, J. M., Hussey, E., Teubner-Rhodes, S., Harbison, J. I., & Bunting, M. F. (2013). Clearing the garden-path: Improving sentence processing through cognitive control training. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(2), 186–217.
Patterson, C. (2012). The effect of local discourse coherence on pronoun resolution: an eye-tracking study. Essex Graduate Student Papers in Language and Linguistics On-line, 131, 98–119. Colchester: Department of Language and Linguistics, 961. URL: [URL]
R Development Core Team. (2012). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372–422.
Rickheit, G. (1975). Zur Entwicklung der Syntax im Grundschulalter. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann.
Schouwenaars, A., Hendriks, P., & Ruigendijk, E. (2018). German children’s processing of morphosyntactic cues in wh-questions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(06), 1279–1318.
Slobin, D. I., & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition, 121, 229–265.
Stromswold, K., Eisenband, J., Norland, E., & Ratzan, J. (2002). Tracking the acquisition and processing of English passives: Using acoustic cues to disam-biguate actives and passives. Paper presented at the
CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing
. New York, NY.
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information during spoken language comprehension. Science, 2681, 1632–1634.
Townsend, D. J., & Bever, T. G. (2001). Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules. Cambridge, Ma. u.a.: Bradford Books.
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73(2), 89–134.
Turner, E. A., & Rommetveit, R. (1967a). The acquisition of sentence voice and reversibility, Child Development,
38
1, 649–660.
Weighall, A. R. (2007). The kindergarten-path effect revisited : Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99(2), 75–95.
Wittek, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). German-speaking children’s productivity with syntactic constructions and case morphology: Local cues act locally. First Language, 25(1), 103–125.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Bryant, Doreen & Benjamin Siegmund
2024.
Passivkonstruktionen im Schulalter: Irritationen, Inkonsistenzen und Implikationen. In
Empirische Zugänge zu Bildungssprache und bildungssprachlichen Kompetenzen [
Sprachsensibilität in Bildungsprozessen, ],
► pp. 121 ff.
Shin, Gyu‐Ho & Seongmin Mun
2023.
Explainability of neural networks for child language: Agent‐First strategy in comprehension of Korean active transitive construction.
Developmental Science 26:6
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.