This dissertation focuses on the acquisition of the English verbal be-passive and the interaction between the lexical meaning of a verb and young children’s observed behavior with the verb in the passive. Specifically, I investigate how children exploit lexical semantic information from their input in order to learn which verbs can passivize and which cannot.
The rest of the dissertation is organized in the following way: In Chapter 2, I introduce the case study of passives and discuss previous research on the acquisition of verbal passives in English and how lexical features can play a pivotal role in explaining children’s understanding of verbal passives. In Chapter 3, I present a corpus study on the relation- ship between children’s age of acquiring a verb in the verbal passive and the linguistic input that is available to them. In Chapter 4, I present a behavioral study in which I test whether linguistic behavior within a group of children can be predicted by a verb’s lexical feature makeup. In Chapter 5, I model the developmental trajectory that we’ve seen in Chapters 2 and 3 via a naive Bayesian learner to explore an acquisition story where children are impacted by lexical features. In Chapter 6, I present a behavioral study on how children deal with the passivization of novel (i.e., nonce) verbs with different lexical feature makeups in an experimental context in which children’s linguistic input is tightly controlled. Specifically, I test children’s reliance on particular lexical features as predicted by the computational model developed in the previous chapter. In Chapter 7, I discuss directions for future work and conclude the dissertation by underscoring the importance of considering lexical semantic features when investigating the development of syntactic knowledge.