Production of passive sentences across different task typologies

This study investigates the production of passive sentences by school-aged Italian-speaking children and adults across four different types of tasks. The first task, eliciting passive sentences by hiding the agent of events depicted in a series of drawings, gave rise to the production of short and long passives, as well as of different typologies of active sentences containing clitic pronouns. A second task designed to elicit relative clauses lead to the production of the highest amount of passive sentences. By contrast, two tasks aiming at eliciting cleft sentences and wh-questions brought to the production of a very low amount of passives. We show that the use of a passive clause in a structured task depends on a set of factors, which can be syntactic or pragmatic in nature, and that passive structures are particularly favoured in tasks eliticing relative clauses. We also detect some subtle differences between child and adult usage of passives.