The syntactic abilities of children with SLI: The Passive

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

5. 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)’

6. Issues in acquisition • Reversible vs. non-reversible • Actional vs. non-actional • Adjectival vs. verbal • Do children understand the by-phrase? • Comprehension vs. production

7. Picture selection task How many pictures per verbs? Lihi Koren Naama Friedmann TAPS

8. Picture selection task - cont. How many characters per picture? This is crucial for facilitating the by-phrase

9. 9

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12. What about production? • Elicited imitation • Sentence completion

13. References • Precious, A. & G. Conti-Ramsden. 1988. Language-impaired children's comprehension of active versus passive sentences. British Journal of Communication Disorders23, 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