ArticleCognition2018
Mistakes weren't made: Three-year-olds' comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax.
Article in Cognition, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Preschoolers' Early Sentence Comprehension: Comparing Bilingual and Monolingual Children and the Role of Executive Function and Vocabulary Development.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Article
- Knowing How You Know: Toddlers Reevaluate Words Learned From an Unreliable Speaker.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2021Article
- On the Structure and Source of Individual Differences in Toddlers' Comprehension of Transitive Sentences.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.Cognition · 2020Article
- Referential context and executive functioning influence children's resolution of syntactic ambiguity.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
By about age three, English-learning children begin to understand passive sentences with familiar verbs. We probed the nature of children's linguistic representations by asking whether 3-year-olds promptly extend their emerging knowledge of the passive structure to novel verbs. In three preferential-looking experiments, 3-year-olds (N = 124) interpreted novel verbs presented in short passives (Experiment 1, "She's getting snedded!") as transitive verbs, referring to causal-action rather than solo-action events, and used word-order in full passives, (Experiments 2 and 3, e.g., "She's getting snedded by the boy!"), to select a target event in which the subject was the patient, not the agent of action. Comprehension accuracy in Experiments 1 and 2 varied with vocabulary, but this vocabulary effect disappeared when children were given more time and more repetitions of the test sentences (Experiment 3). These findings support early-abstraction accounts of acquisition: 3-year-olds represent passive syntax in abstract terms, permitting extension to novel verbs. This, in turn, allows them to use passive sentences to identify the grammatical subcategory and meaning of an unknown verb.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.