Elicited production of passive sentences in 6–10 year-old Italian-speaking children

Abstract: In this contribution we investigate the elicited production of passive sentences in Italian children aged 6 to 10. Children were asked to look at a set of drawings and guess what was happening to the patient in each picture (Puppet: “Ora guarda qui, indovina! Cosa succede alla bambina?”, “Now look at this one and guess! What is happening to the girl?”. Target sentence: “La bambina viene/è sgridata”, “The girl is scolded.”). Differently from previous studies on the topic (Volpato, Verin, Cardinaletti, 2012), the agent was partly covered, to prevent the child from using an active sentence containing the agent and an object clitic pronoun referring to the patient. We made use of a specific property of passives, that of allowing the agent to be omitted, when unknown. Results show that the amount of passive sentences slowly increases with age (from 11% to 27%). In all, children produced 21% of passives; they preferred the auxiliary venire over essere, in line with previous findings (Volpato et al., 2012), and chose essere almost exclusively in the present perfect tense (in Italian, the auxiliary venire is impossible in this tense). Despite our task design, children produced active sentences containing a clitic pronoun 65% of times, interpreting the experimenter’s instructions as they had to guess who was the mysterious agent. Moreover, our task induced children to use the indefinite quantifier “someone” as the agent of the active sentence containing the clitic (Qualcuno la sgrida “Someone is scolding her”), (11%), or, more often, a 3rd person plural arbitrary null subject (La sgridano “They are scolding her”), (22%).