Acquisition of the passive in Spanish-speaking children

Abstract

This work examines three-to six-year-old children's acquisition of the Spanish passive. This structure, a notoriously difficult concept for early learners, exhibits great variation in age of acquisition cross-linguistically. Spanish, with two passive constructions, is an ideal case study for the role of frequency in the development of the passive. This study utilizes data from CHIEDE, a spontaneous oral corpus spanning more than 20,000 words of child speech. Only a limited number of studies examining the passive have utilized spontaneous corpus data; as a result, it is unclear if lexical semantic patterns are due to experimental or task effect -an issue that only the inclusion of natural data can resolve. Results show that children only produce one of two possible forms of the Spanish passive. Their production is also limited to action verbs. Finally, while children as young as 3;0 produce the passive, cross-sectional data show the beginnings of a downward U-shaped developmental pattern. These results are explained in terms of acquisition by analogy as children utilize previously-acquired structures to create abstract syntactic representations.