5.6 Comparative Results Across Tasks
5.6.2 Basic (Active) RO/OC vs Embedded Passives
Children performed extremely well overall in the basic RO/OC task, and somewhat less well with the EP task. However, for both RO and OC verbs, children performed significantly better on the RO/OC task than on the EP task (RO: χ2 = 9.94, df = 1,
p= 0.0016; OC: χ2 = 19.02, df = 1, p < 0.0001).
There are several possible explanations for this pattern of performance. One is that children comprehend active RO/OC utterances better than EPs due to the basic fact that the latter contain a passive construction. However, this would not explain why 4-year-olds fail at the basic passive task but succeed at passives embedded under RO verbs.
A second possible explanation is that there is some higher processing load asso- ciated with passives than with actives embedded under RO and OC verbs. Once again, though, this fails to explain the split pattern of performance by 4-year-olds on passives embedded under RO vs under OC verbs. One possibility for salvaging a processing load explanation, however, is that RO verbs might allow a kind of phasal processing (`a la
Chomsky, 2001), in which the matrix clause is processed separately from the lower clause.
In Minimalist theory,phasesare “semantically complete” units12containing a verb, its arguments, and C “as the domain of force plus proposition” (Wexler,2004, p. 164).
Chomsky(2001) suggests that the derivation of any given expression proceeds phase by
12
Chomsky (2001) cites other evidence supporting the notion of derivation by phase, namely that phases are reconstruction sites, and that they have some measure of phonetic independence.
phase. The idea here is that each phase is placed individually in active/working memory, where features are deleted as necessary; afterwards, it is routed to the phonological component, where deleted features are removed from the narrow syntax so the derivation can converge at LF. Importantly, though, once a phase has been through the derivation cycle, no further changes can occur within the phase; only the “edges” of the phase (usually specifiers) are available to other operations.13
While I will not spend too much time on the idea, it is worth nothing that we might make use of the concept of phases here to reflect the fact that the matrix object in an RO utterance actually comprises the edge (the specifier) of the phase of the embedded clause. The matrix object in an OC utterance, in contrast, would not; instead, the PRO subject of the embedded clause would mark the edge of the phasal boundary. To successfully interpret the reference for that PRO, children would be required to process both the matrix and the embedded clause at once (i.e., two phases together). As a result, phasal processing of the most compartmental kind might be allowed in RO-EP but not OC-EP constructions, since the latter (but not the former) involveθ-role assignment between the upper predicate and embedded subject.14 In short, RO utterances, including RO-EPs, might allow for shorter phasal processing units than do OC utterances; these shorter parsing units would predictably result in better performance by children.
Wexler (2004) also makes use of the notion of phases in acquisition. He ac- knowledges problems with his previously proposed ACDH (Borer and Wexler,1987,
1992; Babyonyshev et al., 2001) and instead suggests that children’s pattern of performance on passives can be explained by the Universal Phase Requirement, which
13
Wexler (2004, p. 164) summarizes this Phase Impenetrability Condition in the following way: “When working at a phase, only the edge (the head and spec(s)) of the next lower phase are available for analysis, and nothing lower than the edge. In particular the complement isn’t available.”
14This hypothesis might find support in the pattern of poorer performance seen on RO verbs in the semantic anomaly task by both 4- and 5-year-olds: namely, that they appear to be evaluating the semantics of the lower clause only (and not the entire sentence) with respect to the story context. See Chapter7below for more details.
is hypothesized to hold until about age 5. The UPR dictates that v defines a phase, whether it is “defective” (i.e., doesn’t select an external argument, as is the case in ver- bal passives and unaccusatives) or not. In short, “a child takes a light verb that doesn’t head a phase in the adult to actually head a phase” (p. 175). The phasehood of defective
v causes a problem for the child when it results in a lack of convergence at LF due to uninterpretableφ and EPP features surfacing unchecked.
Wexler assumes that there is a covert A-chain for the embedded subject in an ECM utterance; because the ACDH predicts delays in covert as well as overt A-chains, it predicts delays in ECM structures. In contrast, because movement in an ECM con- struction is thought to take place within a phase, even linguistically pre-mature children will be able to construct and parse these utterances.15
One difficulty in assessing children’s poorer performance on EP constructions re- lates to the nature of the test items themselves. EP test items with target false answers differed among themselves with regard to how they were structured. Some of these items were constructed with the violation occurring as a result of theθ-role assignment of the matrix OC verb; i.e., while the semantics of the embedded passive matched the story context, the embedded subject was not actually the character who wasaskedortold. For example, there was one vignette in which a lion told a bear to ride a horse. Given the test item[The lion] told the horse to be ridden by the bear, the embedded clausethe horse to be ridden by the bear would be felicitous, but the target answer would still be false, since it was the bear, and notthe horse, who was the “tellee.” Thus, in order to succeed on such items, children would have to understand both the passive construction and the OC verbs’ pattern ofθ-role assignment.
15
Wexler(2004) argues that “to the extent that ECM structures are indeed not delayed in children, not only do they provide evidence for UPR, but they provide evidence against ACDH” (p. 176). While I do not subscribe to a maturation account of acquisition, the data presented in this dissertation will likely be of interest to those who do. However, it is difficult to know what conclusions maturationists would draw from the patterns seen here, since—as we will see in the next chapter—children who perform above chance in their interpretations of active ECM/RO utterances may still perform at chance on semantic anomaly and grammaticality judgments of these constructions. The question for all researchers would obviously be at what point we can claim that children “have” a particular construction.
In contrast, other test items violated only the passive construction; i.e., the agent and patient were swapped, such that children who relied on a word-order strategy for interpretation of the passive would incorrectly accept such items. For example, in one vignette Winnie the Pooh asked Tigger to call Elmo. The test item appearing after this vignette,[Pooh] needed Tigger to be called by Elmo, thus switched the roles of agent and patient in the embedded clause.
There was one test item which did not fall into into either of these categories; this item ([The policeman] wanted the horse to be seen by the farmer) followed a vignette in which the policeman was described as not wanting anyone to see the horse, and thus would have been true if the matrix verb been negated.
However, an item-by-item analysis indicated that children’s poor performance did not cluster around one particular item type. Instead, children seemed to have a random pattern of correct and incorrect responses per item type. Children’s performance on individual items appears in Table 5.5below.
Table 5.5: Child Performance on Target-False Embedded Passives
Class Verb Item Violation Type % Correct
RO want . . . the horse to be seen by the farmer Neither 87.50** need . . . Tigger to be called by Elmo Agent-theme 56.25 OC ask . . . Dora to be hugged by Cookie Monster θ-role 31.25 . . . the cat to be licked by the dog θ-role 62.50 tell . . . the horse to be ridden by the bear θ-role 75.00*
. . . the cat to be scratched by the dog Agent-theme 56.25 *p < 0.05, **p <0.01
Several items are worthy of note here. First, as noted, there was one item that was wrong for neither of these reasons, specifically the test promptThe policeman wanted the horse to be seen by the farmer. This was the item that children performed best on (87.50% correct; χ2 = 9.00, df = 1, p = 0.0027). This should not be too surprising, considering
of θ-assignment (or in this case, lack thereof) by a matrix verb to its embedded subject complement or correct parsing of the embedded expletive. That is to say, assuming the worst case scenario—namely, that children are only parsing the embedded clause, and doing so as if it were an active clause—children could still compare “the horse. . . see. . . the farmer” to the vignette, and come up with the target “false” answer.
Second, in this small data set there is no clear pattern that emerges to indicate whether it is the embedded passive alone, or instead the θ-role assignment between the matrix verb and the embedded subject, which is causing children trouble. As an example, notice that the only single-violation item which children performed above chance on (He told the horse to be ridden by the bear; 75% correct; χ2 = 4.00, df = 1, p = 0.0455)
represented aθ-role assignment violation, but that children didnotperform above chance on the other two items which had such a violation. If anything, it appears that children’s poor performance may (at the very least) be related to issues of θ-assignment, since they did not perform above chance on any of the items which had agents and patients switched, with regard to the pre-item vignette. With such a small sample, however, it is hard to draw any firm conclusions.
Moreover, some mysteries in this data remain. For one thing, both target-falseask
EPs involved θ-role incongruities, but children performed much better on the cat to be licked by the dog than they did on Dora to be hugged by Cookie Monster.16 One possible mechanism behind this distinction is the fact that the former contains two common (definite) NP descriptions (the cat, the dog), while the latter contains two proper names (Dora, Cookie Monster). There is some support in the literature for the notion that these two types of NPs are processed differently (e.g.,Gordon et al.,2001,2002;Warren
and Gibson, 2002; Gordon et al., 2004), although the effects are complicated and
16Neither level of performance is statistically different from a chance level. However, children’s per- formance on asked Dora to be hugged by Cookie Monstercame much closer to being significantly below
chance (31.25% correct,p= 0.1336) than their performance onasked the cat to be licked by the dogcame to beingaboveit (62.5% correct,p= 0.3173).
interact with other linguistic phenomena.17
Ideally, future work would focus on these constructions by including a number of target items of one type and then the other, to tease out the effects of θ-role assignment from the matrix verb from effects due to basic trouble with the passive, including relying on a word-order interpretation strategy. Such work should also control more carefully for effects of NP type (i.e., description vs. name).