Children's assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences

Children's difficulty understanding passives in English has been attributed to the syntactic complexity, overall frequency, cue reliability, and/or incremental processing of this construction. To understand the role of these factors, we used the visual-world paradigm to examine comprehension in Mandarin Chinese where passives are infrequent but signaled by a highly valid marker (BEI). Eye-movements during sentences indicated that these markers triggered incremental role assignments in adults and 5-year-olds. Actions after sentences indicated that passives were often misinterpreted as actives when markers appeared after the referential noun ("Seal BEI it eat" -> The seal is eaten by it). However, they were more likely to be interpreted correctly when markers appeared before ("It BEI seal eat" -> It is eaten by the seal). The actions and the eye-movements suggest that for both adults and children, interpretations of passive are easier when they do not require revision of an earlier role assignment. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.