SPECIFICALLY LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED AND NORMALLY DEVELOPING-CHILDREN - VERBAL PASSIVE VS ADJECTIVAL PASSIVE SENTENCE INTERPRETATION

The focus of this study is the acquisition and underlying syntactic re presentation of passive sentences in a subgroup of 15 'Grammatical spe cifically language impaired' (SLI) children (aged 9:3-12:10) and 36 yo unger normally developing, language ability (LA) control children (age d 5:5-8:9). In particular, the paper is concerned with the differences between a verbal and adjectival passive interpretation of the passive participle in short passive sentences. Van der Lely (1994) proposed t hat SLI children have a 'Representational Deficit for Dependent Relati onships' (RDDR), The syntactic characterization of this deficit is not altogether clear, but I propose that problems with Spec-Head relation s may provide an adequate description, This proposal predicts that SLI children should be able to derive an adjectival passive but not a ver bal passive representation, Active, full and short progressive passive , and ambiguous (potentially adjectival) short passive sentences were investigated, A picture pointing response paradigm, in which the child chose one of four pictures, enabled responses to be differentiated: i .e. transitive (actional), adjectival (stative), and reversal (where t hematic roles normally assigned to the subject or object were reversed ), The test sentences were also administered to 12 adult subjects. The study revealed that Grammatical SLI children were significantly worse at interpreting transitive verbal passive sentences than the younger LA controls. The SLI children, and occasionally the younger LA control s, may interpret an unambiguously verbal passive sentence as an adject ival-stative passive. The SLI children showed a strong preference for an adjectival interpretation for the ambiguous passive sentences. Diff erences in the syntactic representations of verbal and adjectival pass ive sentences can account for the findings. The data indicate that the Grammatical SLI children and young children have problems deriving th e syntactic representation underlying a verbal passive sentence but no t the less complex adjectival-stative passive. The findings from this study for Grammatical SLI children are consistent with the proposed RD DR characterized by problems in Spec-Head relations. The study provide s new empirical evidence for the different syntactic nature of verbal and adjectival passive sentences and has implications for language acq uisition and the modularity of language.