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Many studies find true verbal passives in English acquired only after age four, but some find three-year-olds fully adultlike. We explain this discrepancy using Relativized Minimality (RM, Rizzi 2004). Collins (2005a) argues the passive involves movement of the logical object across the logical subject (either PRO, or a lexical DP with 'by'), and normally this requires smuggling. We propose smuggling is maturationally unavailable until age four. Three-year-olds succeed only if the intervener is eliminated, as in certain Romance reflexive-clitic constructions; or if +Topic/+WH on the logical object can prevent an RM violation, as in certain studies of the English passive. Following Grillo (2008), we explain the still-later acquisition of non-actional passives by their need for both smuggling and semantic coercion.

Spanish exhibits a determiner phrase (DP)-internal phenomenon (noun-drop or Ndrop) closely analogous to subject pro-drop. Where English has the near-vacuous nominal one in the DP the blue one, for example, Spanish lacks any overt nominal: el azul, literally 'the blue'. The availability of N-drop in a language has been linked by some authors to richness of the overt agreement morphology on adjectives, determiners, or both. The evidence from child language acquisition, however, runs counter to this view. In particular, a detailed case study of the longitudinal corpus of child Spanish data from Montes (1987) revealed that the child acquired the full Spanish system of DP-internal agreement morphology significantly earlier than she acquired N-drop. This finding indicates that rich agreement morphology is not in itself a sufficient condition for N-drop.