Developmental Psychology

Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc

1999, Vol. 35, No. 1,29-44
0012-1649/99/S3.00

Young Children Learn to Produce Passives With Nonce Verbs

Patricia J. Brooks Michael Tomasello

The College of Staten Island of the Emory University
City University of New York

Younger and older children (mean ages = 2 years 11 months and 3 years 5 months) learned 2 nonce verbs
in a full passive or active transitive construction. When asked patient-focused questions encouraging
passive-voice replies (e.g., "What happened to the ball?") or agent-focused questions encouraging
active-voice replies (e.g., "What did Elmo do?"), children used a variety of strategies to meet the
demands of the questions, usually without changing the construction in which the verb occurred. In
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Study 2 in which passive and active constructions were primed, 40% of the almost 3-year-old children
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used an active-introduced verb in a passive construction and 35% used a passive-introduced verb in an
active transitive construction when discourse demands encouraged them to do so. Thus, before their 3rd
birthdays, some children have an understanding of the passive and active transitive constructions general
enough to support productive usages with newly learned verbs.

The English passive comprises a family of related constructions
whose primary function is to focus attention on the patient of a
transitive action and what happened to it (defocusing the agent in
the process; Shibitani, 1985). Thus, in the full passive construc-
tion, The cat was chased by the dog, the focus is on the cat and
what happened to it, rather than on the dog's act of chasing as in
the active description of this event. In the so-called truncated
passive construction, The cat was chased up a tree, the fact that a
dog did the chasing is not indicated at all. In addition to these two
general forms, Budwig (1990) showed that the "get" and "be"
forms of the passive are prototypically associated with distinct
discourse perspectives. Thus, the prototypical "get" passive in
Wendy got drenched in the sudden downpour tends to be used
when an animate patient is adversely affected by an inanimate
entity or nonagent source. In contrast, the "be" passive in This
book was written by a warped personality, or simply This book
was written in three weeks, is prototypically used when an inani-
mate entity undergoes a more neutral change of state in which the
agent causing the change of state is unknown or irrelevant. In most
accounts, adjectival passives such as / am scared of dogs are
distinguished from other passive constructions.
English-speaking children typically do not produce full passive
sentences in their spontaneous speech until 4 or 5 years of age,
Patricia J. Brooks, Department of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthro-
pology, The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York;
Michael Tomasello, Department of Psychology, Emory University.
This work was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.
We thank the parents, teachers, and children at the Oak Grove Preschool
and Day Care Center and the Decatur First United Methodist Preschool and
Parent's Morning Out programs in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. We also
thank Deanne Swan for her assistance with data collection and Felix
Scherer for constructing wonderful toys for us.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patricia J.
Brooks, Department of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, The
College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, 2800 Victory
Boulevard 4S-223, Staten Island, New York 10314. Electronic mail may be
sent to pbrooks@postbox.csi.cuny.edu.
although they occasionally produce truncated passives somewhat
earlier (often with get, as in The bunny got caught; Harris & Flora,
1982). In elicitation experiments in which discourse pressure is
used to encourage children to produce passives (e.g., children are
asked questions such as "What happened to the bunny?"), the
majority of 3-year-olds can produce truncated passives with fa-
miliar verbs, with about one quarter able to produce full passives
(Marchman, Bates, Burkhardt, & Good, 1991; see also Horgan,
1978). The following are the most obvious reasons for the rela-
tively late acquisition of full passives in English: (a) It is a marked
construction, containing several additional linguistic elements rel-
ative to active-voice constructions (an auxiliary be or get, a marked
form of the verb in the past participle, and the preposition by to
explicitly mark the agent), and (b) it is not a frequent construction
in child-directed speech. Empirical support for the latter point is
supplied by studies of children's early linguistic experience in
which full passives constitute only a tiny fraction of the speech
children hear. In an informal study reported by Maratsos, Fox,
Becker, and Chalkley (1985), 37.5 hr of parent-child interaction
yielded a total of one full passive in the speech directed to the
child. In a more systematic study of the Adam, Eve, and Sarah
corpora in the CHILDES database, Gordon and Chafetz (1990)
examined 86,655 child-directed utterances (with the children rang-
ing in age from 1 year 6 months to 5 years 1 month) and identified
only four full passive utterances; there were 84 tokens, represent-
ing 52 types of truncated passives.
It is important to note that children acquiring certain other
languages, mostly non-Indo-European, do not experience the same
obstacles to the acquisition of passives as children acquiring En-
glish, and so they typically learn to produce them much earlier in
development. This is true for children learning Inuktitut (Allen &
Crago, 1996), K'iche' Mayan (Pye & Quixtan Poz, 1988), Sesotho
(Demuth, 1989, 1990), and Zulu (Suzman, 1985). For example,
Allen and Crago (1996) found that a child at age 2 years 0 months
to 2 years 9 months (as well as two slightly older children)
produced both truncated and full passives quite regularly. Al-
though a majority of these were with familiar actional verbs, also

29
 30 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO
present were passives with experiential predicates and several
clearly innovative forms with verbs that do not passivize in adult
Inuktitut, indicating the productivity of the construction for these
children. The reasons for this precocity relative to English-
speaking children would seem to involve both of the factors
invoked to explain the late acquisition of English passives: (a)
Inuktitut passives are very common in child-directed speech; and
(b) passive utterances are actually simpler than active-voice con-
structions in Inuktitut because the passivized verb has to agree
only with the grammatical subject, whereas the active transitive
verb has to agree with both the subject and the object.
Given that English-speaking children hear passive sentences
only infrequently and are relatively late in acquiring them, it is not
surprising that they are not productive with the passive construc-
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tion until relatively late in development. A number of researchers
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have observed that English-speaking children occasionally pro-
duce passives with verbs that in adult English do not passivize, for
example, He get died and It was bandaided, indicating some
productivity with the construction (Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Clark,
1982). Such utterances are produced almost exclusively by chil-
dren over 3 years of age, mostly by children over 4 years of age
(see the compilation of Pinker, Lebeaux, & Frost, 1987). In the
only experimental study to examine the issue of productivity,
Pinker et al. (1987) trained 3- to 4-year-old English-speaking
children to produce active sentences with nonce verbs, as in The
boy pilked the dog. They then put the children under discourse
pressure to produce a passive with that novel verb by asking, for
example, "What happened to the dog?" Even though they had
never heard this verb in the passive voice, children as young as 3
years 10 months were successful in producing passives, indicating
that they came to the experiment in possession of a generalized
understanding of the passive construction to which they could
assimilate the new verb. Unfortunately, it was not reported
whether any of the children's utterances were full passives.
In the present study, we asked three questions about young
children's acquisition of the English passive. First, we wanted to
know if very young children—below 3 years of age in the young-
est age group—could learn to produce full passive sentences with
the appropriate kind of exposure and training. If they could, it
would provide evidence that the linguistic complexities of the
English passive are not an insurmountable obstacle for children
this young, but that the essential problem is the low frequency with
which they are typically exposed to passives in their natural
environments. Unlike previous studies with older children that
simply provided them with "input" of full passive sentences, we
chose to train children in a more discourse-intensive manner in
which the adult asked questions about various elements of the
novel event in a way that helped children to build up gradually to
the full passive structure (e.g., "Who got meeked?" or "The car got
meeked by who?"). Moreover, we also set up a situation in which
both the agent and the patient were variable across different
enactments of the event so that explicit mention of the participants
was clearly discourse appropriate (e.g., "Look! This time the ball
is getting meeked by the frog!").
Our second question concerned the extent to which young
children could be productive in their use of the English passive.
We thus also taught some children to produce active-voice transi-
tive utterances with the same novel verbs and then, as in previous
studies with older children, placed them under discourse pressure
to produce passive sentences with that verb. If children below 3
years of age are productive with the passive construction, one
could argue that a generalized representation of this construction
underlies even their very earliest productions of the passive. If they
are not productive, then a verb-by-verb account would be sup-
ported, implying that it is only after children have learned to
produce passive sentences with some number of verbs individually
that their understanding of the construction becomes general
enough to support productive usages. It should be noted that in our
study the children who first learned to produce passive utterances
containing the nonce verbs were also placed under discourse
pressure to produce active transitive sentences with their newly
learned verbs. We were thus able to test the same two
hypotheses—verb-by-verb acquisition or productive use of a gen-
eralized construction—for the active transitive construction as
well.
Our third question was the extent to which young children
would use pronouns for agents and patients in passive and active
transitive constructions, and whether their use of pronouns would
interact with the different kinds of questions we asked them (i.e.,
agent-focused questions such as "What did [agent] do?"; patient-
focused questions such as "What happened to [patient]?"; and
neutral questions such as "What happened?"). The issue of pro-
nouns is particularly important because of the different ways in
which passive and active constructions affect the discourse prom-
inence of the agent and patient. This would be expected to interact
with the level of specificity with which agents and patients are
linguistically indicated using full nouns and pronouns.
Study 1
Method
Participants. Twenty-eight younger children (mean age = 34.6
months, range = 33-36 months; 14 boys and 14 girls) and 28 older
children (mean age = 40.9 months, range = 39-44 months;14 boys and 14
girls) participated in the study. One boy in the older group did not use the
target verbs during the course of the experiment and was replaced. The
majority of the children came from White, middle-class families and were
recruited and tested at four preschools and day-care centers in the Atlanta,
Georgia, metropolitan area. Some children were recruited through the
Emory University Child Participant Pool and were tested at the Department
of Psychology at Emory University.
Materials and design. Two novel verbs, meek and tarn, were used to
describe two transitive actions that could be performed with two novel
toys. Meeting was used to refer to a puppet pulling a small object up a
ramp (the object was inside a clear jar attached to a string and was pulled
up through a clear tube attached to the ramp). For each enactment, 1 of 10
different puppets representing familiar animals and characters was used to
pull the object up the ramp (i.e., as agent), and 1 of 10 inanimate objects
(e.g., a toy banana, ball, bus, stove) was used as the object to be pulled up
(i.e., as patient). Tamming was used to refer to the action of an object
attached to a pendulum that hit and knocked another object off a pedestal.
For each enactment, 1 of 10 different inanimate toy objects was attached to
the pendulum using Velcro and was used to do the hitting (i.e., as agent),
and 1 of 10 animate objects (e.g., a toy robot, frog, dog, dinosaur) was set
on the pedestal to be knocked off (i.e., as patient). Thus, for the action
called meeking, all of the possible actors were animate and the patients
were inanimate; for tamming, the actors were inanimate and the patients
were animate.
There were two experimental conditions: the passive training group and
the active transitive training group. Each child learned both of the exper-
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
imental verbs in the same way, that is, in the get passive construction (e.g.,
"The stove's gonna get meeked by Ernie" and "The dog got tammed by the
clock") or in the active transitive construction (e.g., "Ernie's meeking the
stove" and "The clock tammed the dog"). At each age, 20 children were in
the passive training group and 8 children were in the active transitive
training group. Children were randomly assigned to passive and active
transitive training groups with the conditions that the mean ages for the
passive and active groups were equal and both groups had equal numbers
of boys and girls.
Training and elicitation procedures. Children were tested individually
in two 30-min sessions conducted within the span of 1 week. Two tape
recorders were used to record each session; in addition, a handwritten log
was kept of the children's utterances and relevant gestures (e.g., pointing).
Two experimenters conducted the procedure: One experimenter interacted
with the child, whereas the other wrote down what the child said. The first
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experimenter's goal was to teach the children how to use the verbs through
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scaffolded discourse. In the first session, 10 sequences of models were
provided for each novel verb with each sequence consisting of eight
utterances describing the action of a particular pair of objects. For instance,
children exposed to the novel verb meeking in the passive construction
would hear the experimenter (E) say a sequence of models such as the
following:
1. Look, the car is going to get meeked.
2. The car is going to get meeked by Big Bird.
3. What's going to get meeked? (E points to the car)
4. That's right, the car is going to get meeked.
5. The car is going to get meeked by who? (E points to Big Bird)
6. Yes, the car is getting meeked by Big Bird, (while performing action)
7. Did you see what got meeked by Big Bird? (E points to the car)
8. Exactly! The car got meeked by Big Bird.
Children exposed to meeking in the active transitive construction would
hear a sequence such as:
1. Look, Big Bird is going to meek something.
2. Big Bird is going to meek the car.
3. Who's going to meek the car? (E points to Big Bird)
4. That's right, Big Bird is going to meek the car.
5. Big Bird is going to meek what? (E points to the car)
6. Yes, Big Bird is meeking the car. (while performing action)
7. Did you see who meeked the car? (E points to Big Bird)
8. Exactly! Big Bird meeked the car.
In the first session, children heard 10 sequences of models for the first verb,
then 10 for the second verb. The order of actions (meeking and tamming)
varied across participants and sessions. In general, the experimenter started
with whichever toy the child approached first to maximize the child's
engagement with the activity.
Children's participation in the discourse was encouraged in several
ways. First, at regular intervals the experimenter invited the child to name
the action by saying, "This is called meeking (or tamming). Can you say
meeking? Say meeking." Second, at regular intervals the experimenter
paused in mid-sentence (with an encouraging final intonation contour) to
let the child finish the sentence (e.g., "The car is gonna get meeked by . . . "
or later "The car is gonna.. ."). Third, after one or two sequences of
models were completed, the experimenter provided an additional opportu-
nity for children to use the novel verb spontaneously by asking a neutral
question such as "What happened?" or "What is going to happen now?"
And finally, to further encourage children to use the novel verb in the target
construction, in the 6th through 10th sequences, we introduced a "match-
ing" question. For children in the passive training condition, the matching
question consisted of a patient-focused question, which directed the child's
attention to the object affected by the action (e.g., "What happened to the
car?"). For children in the active training condition, the matching question
31
consisted of an agent-focused question, which directed attention to the
object or puppet performing the action (e.g., "What did Big Bird do?").
The second session began with two sequences of models for the first
novel verb. The sequences again consisted of eight utterances in which the
experimenter modeled usage of the verbs and scaffolded the child's dis-
course. In addition, neutral and matching questions were administered with
each sequence of models. After the two sequences were completed, an
elicited production task was administered. In the elicited production task,
the experimenter did not generate any utterances containing the novel
verbs. After two new objects were introduced and placed on the appropriate
apparatus, the experimenter asked three questions in a random order. The
questions were (a) a neutral question ("What happened?" or "What is going
to happen now?"), (b) a patient-focused question (e.g., "What happened to
[patient]?" or "What is going to happen to [patient] now?"), and (c) an
agent-focused question ("What did [agent] do?" or "What is [agent] going
to do now?"). The patient-focused question matched the discourse perspec-
tive of the passive construction and mismatched the discourse perspective
of the active transitive construction, whereas the agent-focused question
mismatched the discourse perspective of the passive construction while
matching that of the active transitive construction. The purpose of the
elicited production task was (a) to determine whether children would use
the novel verbs in the targeted constructions under conditions in which the
experimenter no longer provided models and scaffolded discourse, and (b)
to examine children's strategies in answering questions that mismatched
the discourse perspective of the construction in which they had heard the
novel verbs used. The elicited production task was administered three times
with unique pairs of objects, providing the child with three opportunities to
answer neutral, matching, and mismatching questions with each novel
verb. The order of the questions was randomized such that each question
was presented first, second, or third an approximately equal number of
times. After the elicited production task was administered three times for
the first verb, the procedure (two complete discourse sequences followed
by elicited production) was repeated for the second verb.
Observational and analytic procedures. During both sessions, the sec-
ond experimenter wrote down all of the child's utterances that used one of
the experimental verbs. The accuracy of the handwritten log was subse-
quently checked against the audiotaped recording. In all cases, the hand-
written log was corrected if the audiotape indicated that the child had said
something in addition to, or different from, what was recorded by hand. In
general, the handwritten log was highly accurate except on rare occasions
when the child produced several utterances in a rapid sequence.
In all analyses, we examined children's responses for the elicited pro-
duction task to determine the effects of training condition (passive or
active), age (younger or older), and question type (neutral, matching, or
mismatching). Children's multiword utterances with the novel verbs during
this task were categorized as passive (full or truncated), active transitive, or
intransitive. We also tabulated children's errors with the target verbs (e.g.,
usage of an incorrect noun or nonce verb) and their utterances containing
English verbs. Occasionally a child's reply to a given question consisted of
more than one complete utterance, and so, although children were given six
opportunities to answer each question type (three opportunities per novel
verb), the actual number of utterances recorded per question type some-
times exceeded six utterances. The frequencies of the most common
utterance types (passive, active transitive, intransitive, English verb, and
errors) were analyzed using mixed-design analyses of variance (ANOVAs)
with training condition and age group as between-subjects variables and
question type as within-subjects variable.
Results
Results are presented for each of the types of sentence construc-
tions children produced with the experimental verbs, with analyses
focusing on the discourse contexts in which they produced them.
We start by presenting the results of preliminary analyses that
 32 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO

show that children demonstrated equal proficiency in learning the
two novel verbs.
To compare the numbers of utterances children produced with
each of the two verbs, we conducted an ANOVA with age (young-
er vs. older children) and training group (passive vs. active) as
between-subjects variable and verb (meek vs. tarn) as a within-
subjects variable. The dependent variable was the total number of
multiword utterances containing the target verb (meek or tarn). The
ANOVA revealed significant main effects of age and training
group only, and no significant interactions. The older group pro-
duced an average of 8.3 utterances with each verb, whereas the
younger children averaged only 6.0 utterances per verb, F(l, 52) =
8.23, p < .01. Children in the active training group averaged 8.7
utterances with each verb, with children in the passive training
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were analyzed in a mixed-design ANOVA with age (younger vs.
older children) and training group (passive vs. active) as between-
subjects variables and question type (neutral, patient, or agent) as
a within-subjects variable. First, children's tendency to use the
novel verbs in the passive construction varied greatly as a function
of training condition, F(l, 52) = 53.30, p < .001. The majority of
children (90%) who heard the experimenter use the novel verbs in
a passive construction produced passives themselves in the elicited
production task (with the passive-trained group averaging about 10
passive utterances per child), whereas only 2 children (12%) who
heard the novel verbs used in an active transitive construction used
the verbs in a passive construction (with the active-trained group
averaging less than one quarter of one passive utterance per child).
Frequencies of passives also varied as a function of the question

group averaging only 6.6 utterances per verb, F(l, 52) = 7.23, p < posed, with the vast majority of children's passives coming in
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.01. Children produced statistically equivalent numbers of utter-
ances with meek and tarn, averaging 7.5 utterances with meek
and 6.9 utterances with tarn, F(l, 52) < 1.
To confirm this result for children's production of passive
utterances only, we conducted an additional ANOVA with age as
a between-subjects variable and verb as a within-subjects variable.
For this ANOVA, the dependent variable was the number of
passive utterances produced by children in the passive training
group only (children in the active training group were not included
because they produced almost no passive utterances). The
ANOVA revealed no main effects or interactions. Children in the
passive training group averaged 5.2 passive utterances with meek
and 4.7 passive utterances with tarn, F(l, 38) = 1.17, ns. Older
children produced an average of 5.4 passives with each novel verb
with younger children averaging 4.5 passives per verb, F(l, 38) =
1.19, ns.
Because the preliminary analyses found no significant differ-
ences in utterance frequencies for the verbs meek and tarn, utter-
ances for both verbs were collapsed in all of the analyses reported
below. We look first at children's passive utterances, then at active
transitive utterances, then at intransitives, and finally at sentences
with English verbs in which children avoided use of the experi-
mental verbs altogether. We conclude with a look at children's use
of pronouns in passive and active transitive utterances.
Passives. Table 1 presents the average numbers of passive
utterances produced in the elicited production task. These data
response to neutral or patient-focused questions (86%). This effect
was highly significant, F(2, 104) = 25.66, p < .001, with planned
comparisons indicating that children produced roughly equal num-
bers of passive utterances in response to neutral and patient-
focused questions, F(l, 104) < 1, and fewer passives in response
to agent-focused questions than for neutral or patient-focused
questions, Fs(l, 104) > 34.33, ps < .001. There was also a
significant interaction between the variables of training group and
question type, F(2, 104) = 22.46, p < .001, which was due to the
fact that almost no passive utterances were produced by the active-
trained children. Thus, the effect of question type was carried
almost entirely by children in the passive training condition. There
was no main effect of age, nor did age interact with either of the
other variables.
Table 2 presents the average numbers of full and truncated
passives produced by the younger and older children of the passive
training group (children in the active training group were not
included because they produced a total of only three passive
utterances, all of which were truncated). These data were analyzed
in a mixed-design ANOVA with age as a between-subjects vari-
able and question type and passive type (full vs. truncated) as
within-subjects variables. The main effect of passive type was
significant, with children producing more full than truncated pas-
sives, F(l, 38) = 11.68,/? < .01. Also, the main effect of question
type was significant, F(2, 76) = 61.97, p < .001, which matched
the results for the overall analysis reported earlier. The interaction

Table 1
Average Numbers of Passive Utterances and Percentage of Children in the Passive and Active
Training Groups Who Produced Them in Study 1

Question type

Neutral Patient Agent Total

Group M % M % M % M %

Passive training
Younger 3.75 85 3.85 85 1.55 45 9.15 85
Older 4.60 95 5.00 95 1.20 40 10.80 95
Active training
Younger 0.00 0 0.12 12 0.00 0 0.12 12
Older 0.12 12 0.12 12 0.00 0 0.25 12

Note, n = 20 at each age for the passive training group; n = 8 at each age for the active training
group. Percentages indicate the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
Table 2
Average Numbers of Full and Truncated Passive Utterances and Percentage of Children in the Passive Training Group
Who Produced Them in Study 1
Question type
Neutral Patient
Full Truncated Full Truncated
Group hi % M % M % M
Younger 2.50 75 1.25 45 2.50 70 1.35
Older 3.25 95 1.35 60 4.15 95 0.85
Note, n - 20 at each age. Percentages indicate the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.
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of question type and passive type also reached significance, F(2,
76) = 15.72, p < .001, with planned comparisons indicating that
children produced a greater number of full passives than truncated
passives in response to neutral or patient-focused questions, Fs(l,
76) > 33.75, ps < .001, and roughly equal numbers of full and
truncated passives in response to agent-focused questions, F(l,
76) < 1. There was no main effect for age, although there was a
significant interaction of age with question type, F(2, 76) = 3.40,
p < .05, and a three-way interaction of age with question type and
passive type, F(2, 76) = 5.00, p < .01. These interactions were
due to the fact that the older children's preferences for passive
utterances, and for full passives over truncated passives in partic-
ular, were stronger in response to neutral and patient-focused
questions than the preferences displayed by the younger children
(although the basic pattern was the same across age groups).
Children in the passive training group made several types of
errors involving the passive construction. On average, each
younger child produced 3.8 passive errors (65% of subjects), and
each older child averaged 3.4 errors (50% of subjects). Of special
interest for current purposes were errors in which the child re-
versed the canonical order of the agent and patient nominals, with
the agent of the action in the preverbal position and the patient of
the action in the fry-phrase. These accounted for 42% of errors for
the younger children and 39% of the errors for the older children
(with 45% of the younger children and 40% of the older children
producing at least one reversal error). Importantly, these reversal
errors came mostly in response to agent-focused questions (67% of
the total). Recall that in agent-focused questions, the child was put
under discourse pressure to produce a sentence with the agent as
subject, and the passive-trained children had never heard the
experimental verbs in any active construction in which the agent
was sentence subject. With some frequency in this situation, chil-
dren responded to questions such as "What did Big Bird do?" by
saying such things as "He got meeked by the car," when the
reverse was actually the case in the real-world situation. It seems
that the children may have treated the verb plus passive morphol-
ogy (e.g., got meeked by) as an unanalyzed whole and thus were
productively varying word order in response to discourse pressure
encouraging them to make the agent be the sentence subject.
In addition to the reversal errors, lexical errors in which the
child substituted an incorrect nonce verb or nominal in the utter-
ance accounted for 20% of the younger children's passive errors
and 55% for the older children. Utterances in which the child
33
A;*ent Total
Full Truncated Full Truncated
% M % hi % M % M %
50 0.90 30 0.65 35 5.90 80 3.25 50
40 0.65 25 0.60 30 8.00 95 2.80 60
omitted the verb altogether accounted for 38% of the younger
children's passive errors and 6% for the older children.
In sum, the overwhelming majority of children (90%) in the
passive training group produced passive utterances, whereas only 2
children (12%) in the active training group ever produced a passive
utterance, even when they were put under discourse pressure to do
so. This latter finding would seem to indicate that the children did
not bring to the experiment a verb-general passive construction to
which they could assimilate their newly learned verbs. Passive-
trained children produced most of their passive utterances in
response to neutral or patient-focused questions (not agent-focused
questions), indicating that they were sensitive to the discourse
demands of the different question types. Consistent with this
interpretation, children made most of their reversal errors in re-
sponse to agent-focused questions in which there was a mismatch
between the construction they had been using and the discourse
demands of the experimenter's question. Children produced more
full than truncated passives, most likely because they heard this
construction most often.
Active-voice transitive utterances. Table 3 presents the aver-
age numbers of active transitive utterances produced in the elicited
production task. These data were analyzed in a mixed-design
ANOVA with age (younger vs. older children) and training group
(passive vs. active) as between-subjects variables and question
type (neutral, patient, agent) as a within-subjects variable. First,
children's tendency to use the novel verbs in the active transitive
construction varied greatly as a function of training condition, F( 1,
52) = 413.08, p < .001. All 16 children in the active training
group produced a wide variety of active-voice transitive utterances
containing the novel verbs, averaging 15.9 active transitive utter-
ances per child. In contrast, in the passive training group only 4 of
the 20 younger children and 11 of the 20 older children ever used
a novel verb in an active transitive utterance (with the passive-
trained children averaging 1.5 active transitive utterances per
child). There was also a main effect of age, F(l, 52) = 11.77, p <
.001, with older children producing more active transitive utter-
ances with the experimental verbs compared with younger chil-
dren. In addition, the main effect of question type was significant,
F(2, 104) = 10.47, p < .001, with children producing the greatest
number of active transitive utterances in response to the agent-
focused questions. Of the tests for the interaction effects, only the
three-way interaction of training condition, age, and question type
reached significance, F(2, 104) = 5.22, p < .01. This reflects the
 34 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO

Table 3
Average Numbers of Active Transitive Utterances and Percentage of Children in the Passive and
Active Training Groups Who Produced Them in Study 1

Question type

Neutral Patient Agent Total

Group M % M % M % M %

Passive training
Younger 0.05 5 0.05 5 0.40 15 0.50 20
Older 0.50 35 0.15 10 1.85 55 2.50 55
Active training
Younger 4.63 100 4.38 100 5.50 100 14.50 10U
Older 6.63 100 5.00 100 5.75 100 17.38 100
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Note, n = 20 at each age for the passive training group; n = 8 at each age for the active training
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group. Percentages indicate the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.

fact that, for the active-trained children, active transitive utterances
were numerous for both age groups in response to all three ques-
tion types, whereas this was not true for the passive-trained chil-
dren. For the passive training group, there was an interaction
between age and question type, F(2,76) = 6.57, p < .01, such that
the younger children produced very few active transitive utter-
ances with the novel verbs in response to any question type,
whereas the older children produced 50 active transitive utter-
ances, the majority of which (74%) were in response to agent-
focused questions.
Errors involving the active transitive construction were less
prevalent than errors involving the passive construction. Children
in the active training group produced an average of 1.69 active
transitive errors (less than half the rate of passive errors produced
by the passive training group), with 62% of the children in the
younger and older groups producing at least one error. Children in
the passive training group made few active transitive errors (1
child produced two such errors), mainly because they produced
relatively few active transitive sentences. Errors involving substi-
tution of an incorrect noun or nonce verb accounted for 76% of
children's active transitive errors. Reversal errors accounted for
24% of active transitive errors and, as expected, were almost
always in response to patient-focused questions (43%) or neutral
questions (43%). These errors, produced by 25% of the active-
trained children at each age, show how the children attempted to
manipulate word order in response to discourse pressure to make
the patient be the sentence subject.
In sum, children in the active training group produced many
active transitive utterances containing the experimental verbs. The
number of active transitive utterances produced by the active-
trained children did not vary much as a function of the question
posed, indicating that the children considered an active transitive
utterance to be a suitable response to any of the elicitation ques-
tions. In contrast, only 20% of the younger children and 55% of the
older children in the passive training group ever used the novel
verbs in active transitive utterances—even when they were put
under discourse pressure to do so. The passive-trained children
who produced active transitive utterances used these utterances
almost exclusively to answer agent-focused questions; these chil-
dren preferred to use passive utterances when responding to neu-
tral or patient-focused questions.
Intransitives. Intransitive usages of the novel verbs were sur-
prisingly infrequent: Only 9 of 40 children (22%) in the passive
training group and 3 of 16 children (19%) in the active training
group ever used the novel verbs in intransitive utterances such as
"It meeked" or "He made it meek." Thus, the majority of children
never used the novel verbs in intransitive sentences in the absence
of hearing the experimenter use the novel verbs in this manner. A
mixed-design ANOVA with between-subjects variables of age and
training condition and a within-subjects variable of question type
showed no main effects and no interaction. Children produced a
total of 18 simple intransitive utterances (e.g., "It meeked") and 5
utterances using a "make" + intransitive construction (e.g., "He
pulled the string and made it meek"). Most (78%) of the simple
intransitives were referentially ambiguous (e.g., "It meeked" could
refer to either the agent or patient's action), 17% expressed the
agent as subject (e.g., "Big Bird meeked"), and 6% expressed the
patient as subject (e.g., "The car meeked"). The 5 utterances
involving usage of a "make" + intransitive construction were
produced by 2 older children in the passive training group in
response to agent-focused questions, indicating sensitivity to the
discourse demands of the agent-focused questions.
English verbs. Children produced utterances containing famil-
iar English verbs fairly frequently: 19 of 40 children (48%) in the
passive training group and 6 of 16 children (38%) in the active
training group used English expressions such as knock down, hit,
fall, pull up, and did it to describe the actions of the toys. Although
the majority of usages of English verbs were in active-voice
transitive or intransitive constructions, six passive-trained children
used English verbs in a passive construction (e.g., "The whale got
done on that" and "It was zoomed up"). Seven out of 10 passive
utterances were truncated and 3 were full (e.g., "He knocked down
by shoe" and "He's gonna get hit by a car"). It seems that the
passive training may have "primed" these children to use the
passive construction with other verbs.
The frequencies of utterances containing English verbs and the
percentages of children in each age group and training condition
who produced them are presented in Table 4. A mixed-design
ANOVA revealed a main effect of question type, F(2, 104) =
3.70, p < .05, which was mitigated by a highly significant inter-
action of training condition and question type, F(2, 104) = 10.06,
p < .001. There was no main effect of training condition. Children
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
in the passive training group produced the majority of their utter-
ances containing English verbs in response to agent-focused ques-
tions, whereas children in the active training group produced most
of their English verb utterances in response to patient-focused
questions. In addition, there was a marginally significant interac-
tion of training group with age, F(l, 52) = 3.66, p = .06, which
was due to the younger children of the passive training condition
using English verbs more than the other groups.
In general, the children resorted to using familiar English verbs
when the constructions in which the novel verbs were introduced
did not match the discourse demands of the question posed. This
strategy resulted in the active-trained children using English verbs
mostly to answer patient-focused questions, whereas the passive-
trained children used English verbs primarily to answer agent-
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35
or "old" information, and the agent-adjunct was "new" informa-
tion. Overall, in children's full passives, patient-subjects were
pronouns, or were omitted altogether, 86% of the time, and their
agent-adjuncts were pronouns only 4% of the time. Utterances
with content nouns expressing both agent and patient roles—as
had been modeled for the children by the adult on almost every
occasion—accounted for only 13% of children's full passive ut-
terances. It is interesting to note that almost all of the utterances in
which children used a full noun as patient-subject were in re-
sponse to neutral questions. This makes discourse sense, as ques-
tions such as "What did Ernie do?" and "What happened to the
car?" use a full nominal to identify the participant that the child
needs to use as subject in the reply: "He meeked the car" or "It got
meeked by Ernie." In neutral questions, no participants are explic-

focused questions. The younger children of the passive training itly mentioned at all, and so it is reasonable for the child to indicate
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group were the most prolific in adopting English substitutes for the
novel verbs, presumably because they often could not find a
satisfactory way to use the novel verbs. The older passive-trained
children relied less often on English verbs, presumably because
they were better able to productively use the experimental verbs in
the active transitive construction. All children in the active training
group relied infrequently on English verbs, most likely because the
active transitive construction was not necessarily a poor choice for
answering a patient-focused question (i.e., in answering the ques-
tion "What happened to the ball?" one could appropriately say, for
instance, "Big Bird meeked it" without changing the construction
in which the verb occurred).
Use of pronouns. Children used pronouns somewhat differ-
ently in their passive and active transitive constructions, although
there was at least one very important similarity. Table 5 presents
the percentages of various types of passive utterances produced by
children in the passive training group only (because active-trained
children produced very few passives), summed across age (be-
cause the two age groups performed very similarly). First, we
present the results for children's full passive utterances. The most
striking result is that fully 83% of children's full passives con-
tained either a pronominal patient-subject and a nominal agent-
adjunct (as in "He got meeked by Ernie"; 58%) or else an omitted
subject and a nominal object (as in "Got meeked by Bert"; 25%).
In conformity to the typical use of the full passive construction,
children were clearly assuming that the patient-subject was shared
them both with full nominals.
The same general pattern held for children's truncated passives.
The patient-subject was expressed with a pronoun or was omitted
in 88% of all passive utterances (with a pronoun in 67%, and an
omission in 21%). As in the case of full passives, truncated
passives with a full noun designating the sentence subject came
mostly in response to neutral questions (79%). Three truncated
passives produced by 1 older child in response to agent-focused
questions ("What's Big Bird gonna do?") are worthy of further
comment. These complex utterances ("He's gonna let that get
meeked," "It made him get meeked," and "He's gonna want that
get meeked") clearly satisfied the discourse demands to place the
agent in subject position, while at the same time following the
passive models in which the child heard the experimental verbs
used. This child never used the experimental verbs in any con-
struction other than the passive, exhibiting marked conservative-
ness with the experimental verbs despite her clear linguistic
sophistication.
Children's use of pronouns in their active transitive utterances
was more variable. Table 6 presents the percentages of each of
several types of active transitive utterances for each training group,
summed across age (because the two ages were highly similar).
The most striking finding is that children in the passive training
group expressed the agent-subject with a pronoun, or else omitted
it entirely, in 90% of their active transitive utterances. This is
broadly congruent with their tendency to use pronouns, or to omit

Table 4
Average Numbers of Utterances Containing English Verbs and Percentage of Children in the
Passive and Active Training Groups Who Produced Them in Study 1

Question type

Neutral Patient Agent Total

Group M % M % M % M %

Passive training
Younger 0.80 30 0.90 45 2.10 70 3.80 70
Older 0.05 5 0.10 10 0.60 35 0.75 35
Active training
Younger 0.12 12 0.50 25 0.12 12 0.75 25
Older 0.12 12 0.75 50 0.00 0 0.88 50

Note, n = 20 in the passive group at each age; n = 8 in the active group at each age. Percentages indicate
the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.
 36 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO

Table 5
Percentages of Full and Truncated Passives of Each Subtype Produced by Children in the Passive Training Group
of Study 1 (TV = 40) ^ ^ ^

Subtype Example Neutral Patient Agent Combined

Full passive % of all full passives

1. P got V by A "The car got meeked by the frog" 10.8 1.8 0.7 13.3
2. P got V by pronoun "The car got meeked by that" 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.4
3. Pronoun got V by A "It got meeked by the frog" 19.4 30.9 7.9 58.3
4. Pronoun got V by pronoun "It got meeked by that" 0.4 0.0 0.4 0.7
5. Pronoun got V by [omitted] "It got meeked by the..." 0.4 0.4 0.4 1.1
6. Got V by A "Got meeked by the frog" 10.1 12.9 1.4 24.5
7. Got V by pronoun "Got meeked by that" 0.0 1.8 0.0 1.8

Truncated passive % of all truncated passives

"The car got meeked" 9.1 0.8 1.7 11.6
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1. P got V
"It got meeked" 26.4 24.8 15.7 66.9
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2. Pronoun got V
3. Got V "Got meeked" 7.4 10.7 3.3 21.5

Note. P = patient (full noun); V = verb; A = agent (full noun).

the subjects of their passive sentences as well. Passive-trained
children expressed the patient-object with a pronoun in 57% of
their active transitive utterances, however, clearly deviating from
their strong tendency with passives to express the postverbal
argument with a full nominal. Over half of passive-trained chil-
dren's active transitive utterances had only pronouns as indicators
of the participants.
In contrast to children in the passive training group, children in
the active training group used pronouns less often to indicate
participants. Active-trained children expressed the agent-subject
with a pronoun, or else omitted it, in 68% of their active transitive
utterances. In contrast, these children used pronouns to express
patient-objects only 18% of the time. The major difference with
the passive training group was that children in the active training
group used full nouns in both agent-subject and patient-object
positions—thus copying the adult model exactly—over 31% of the
time. They did this mostly in response to either neutral or patient-
focused questions, which again indicates discourse sensitivity be-
cause an agent-focused question ("What did Ernie do?") pulls
strongly for a pronominal subject in response.
Overall, then, children's use of pronouns in this experiment
simply underscores their sensitivity to the discourse demands of
both the constructions they are using and the questions they are
answering. The most striking overall pattern is children's extensive
use of what Chafe (1995) called the light subject constraint. Adults
overwhelmingly express shared information in subject position in
pronominal form (sometimes using presentational sentences to
establish a topic and using a pronoun thereafter), and it seems that
our 2- and 3-year-olds did this an overwhelming majority of the
time as well. The finding that children pronominalized subjects
most often when using the passive or when creating a novel active
transitive utterance (having been trained with passive utterances)
suggests the possibility that something like processing load may be
at work as well, because it is most efficient to use full nouns with

Table 6
Percentages of Active Transitive Utterances of Each Subtype Produced by Children in the Passive and Active Training Groups
of Study 1

% of all active transitive utterances

Active transitive subtype Example Neutral Patient Agent Combined

Passive training group

1. A V P "The frog meeked the car" 5.0 0.0 0.0 5.0
2. A V pronoun "The frog meeked it" 3.3 1.7 0.0 5.0
3. Pronoun V P "He meeked the car" 0.0 0.0 18.3 18.3
4. Pronoun V pronoun "He meeked it" 8.3 3.3 28.3 40.0
5. V P "Meeked the car" 0.0 0.0 20.0 20.0
6. V pronoun "Meeked it" 1.7 1.7 8.3 11.7
Active training group
1. A V P "The frog meeked the car" 13.3 14.5 3.5 31.4
2. A V pronoun "The frog meeked it" 0.0 0.4 0.4 0.8
3. Pronoun V P "He meeked the car" 11.0 5.9 9.8 26.7
4. Pronoun V pronoun "He meeked it" 3.1 2.7 2.0 7.8
5. V P "Meeked the car" 5.5 3.5 14.5 23.5
6. V pronoun "Meeked it" 2.4 2.4 5.1 9.8

Note, n = 40 for the passive training group; n = 16 for the active training group. A = agent (full noun); V = verb; P = patient (full noun).
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
a fully mastered construction and pronouns when using less fa-
miliar constructions (Bloom, 1991; Chafe, 1995).
Discussion
In the present study, we successfully taught English-speaking
children ranging in age from 33 to 44 months to produce passive
and active transitive utterances with two nonce verbs. Ninety
percent of the passive-trained children learned to use the experi-
mental verbs with the passive construction, using mostly full rather
than truncated passives, and 100% of the active-trained children
learned to use the verbs with the active transitive construction.
Children accomplished this after only 1 hr of training, and they
produced many examples of these two constructions during the
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elicitation period at the end of the hour: Over 10 per child for
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passives and over 15 per child for actives.
Children were equally proficient in learning the two experimen-
tal verbs. It was somewhat surprising that children did not find the
nonce verb tarn harder than meek, because meek was prototypical
in calling for an animate agent and an inanimate patient, whereas
tarn involved inanimate agents and animate patients. However, it
should be noted that our manipulation of animacy was a rather
weak one because the animate objects involved were toys as
opposed to real animate agents or patients. Although some of the
toys were used to represent animate objects and some represented
inanimate objects, none of them could get up and move on their
own.
Some children showed an understanding of the active transitive
construction that was clearly verb-general. That is, their represen-
tation of the active transitive construction was abstract enough to
support productive transfer to newly learned verbs that the child
had never heard used in this construction. Thus, 20% of the
younger children and 55% of the older children who were trained
to use the nonce verbs in the passive construction were able to
produce an active transitive utterance with those verbs when they
were put under discourse pressure to do so, even though they had
never heard the verbs used in that way. This argues that these
children had an abstract schema for the active transitive construc-
tion to which they assimilated their newly learned verbs as they
attempted to answer the agent-focused questions. On the other
hand, few children of either age showed similar command of the
passive construction. Only 1 younger child and 1 older child (12%)
who were trained to use the nonce verbs in the active transitive
construction produced a passive utterance when they were put
under discourse pressure to do so (and they did this very infre-
quently). This suggests that most of the children did not have a
verb-general schema for the passive construction to which they
could assimilate their newly learned verbs as they attempted to
answer the patient-focused questions. In general, then, the results
of this study suggest that very few English-speaking children
below 3 years of age can productively extend usage of passive and
active transitive constructions to verbs they have never heard used
with these constructions. However, another possibility is that the
conditions of Study 1 were not sufficient to draw out verb-general
knowledge of passive and active transitive constructions in chil-
dren below 3 years of age. This possibility is addressed in Study 2.
Children in Study 1 showed a great deal of sensitivity to the
discourse demands of the questions posed, especially the children
in the passive training group. The passive-trained children pro-
37
duced many fewer passive utterances in response to agent-focused
questions than they did to neutral or patient-focused questions
(about one third the number). Children also made reversal errors
relatively frequently in which they expressed the agent in the
preverbal position and the patient in the fry-phrase. Thus, in re-
sponse to discourse pressure to have the agent be the sentence
subject, 45% of the younger children and 40% of the older children
varied word order without changing the form in which the verb
occurred. In addition, when asked the mismatching agent-focused
questions, the younger passive-trained children often used an En-
glish verb, avoiding use of the experimental verb altogether. It is
clear that many of the younger children were in a quandary about
how to simultaneously be discourse appropriate (by making the
agent the subject of their reply) and still use the syntactic marking
pattern they had heard the adult use with the experimental verb.
The older children in the passive training group relied on the same
strategies when asked the mismatching agent-focused questions,
but many of them were able to draw on a wider range of syntactic
options. Thus, 55% of the older passive-trained children simply
used the active transitive construction to reply—an option appar-
ently not available to the majority of the younger children. Several
of the older children also used a periphrastic causative construc-
tion, either with a truncated passive or intransitive usage of the
verb (e.g., "He made it get meeked" or "He made it meek"). The
overall picture is thus one in which children of both ages know that
the subject of their reply to an agent-focused question should have
the agent as subject, but they have different syntactic resources for
responding to this discourse demand.
Children's use of pronouns in the experiment also demonstrated
their sensitivity to discourse pressure. The most general finding
was that they used pronouns as the sentence subject of the over-
whelming majority of their replies to the adult's questions, even
though they almost never heard the experimental verbs used with
pronouns. This was especially noteworthy in the passive training
group in which children's most common pattern for replying to
neutral and patient-focused questions was to use a pronoun for the
patient-subject and a full noun for the agent in the by-phrase,
whereas they did all kinds of things to avoid the passive in reply
to agent-focused questions (as discussed earlier). In their use of the
active transitive construction, the children used subject pronouns
especially often when they were asked the matching agent-focused
question, as would be discourse appropriate.
In some ways, the most surprising findings of Study 1 concerned
children's limited productivity in varying the constructions in
which the novel verbs were used. It is possible, however, that some
children may have been capable of using the novel verbs in the
"opposite" construction, but task demands interfered with their
performance. There are two main possibilities. First, some children
may have construed the experimental situation as one in which
their task was to talk the way the experimenter was talking, and for
any given child that involved one construction, either passive or
active transitive, for both of the novel verbs. Children may thus
have been primed to talk in only one way in the experimental
situation. Second, within each of the verbs, children were encour-
aged to conceptualize the event from only one perspective, that is,
from the agent's perspective in the active training group and from
the patient's perspective in the passive training group. Although
the discourse demands of the mismatching questions invited chil-
dren to take the opposite perspective, this may not have been
 38 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO
sufficiently powerful to overcome all of the previous training. We
designed Study 2 to test these two possibilities by priming both
active and passive constructions within a single session, and by
encouraging children to adopt both agent-focused and patient-
focused perspectives on the events.
Study 2
Study 2 was similar to Study 1, with two modifications corre-
sponding to the two concerns expressed earlier. First, instead of
being trained in the same way for both of their experimental verbs,
as in Study 1, children in the second experiment were trained with
the passive construction for one of their verbs and with the active
transitive construction for the other. Second, instead of training
solely from one perspective for a given event, as in Study 1, we
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also provided children with some discourse about the event from
the "opposite" perspective using the common English verbs do and
happen. That is, if the active transitive construction was being
trained using sentences such as "Big Bird is meeking the car," we
also sometimes said things such as "Look what happened to the
car!" Conversely, when the passive construction was being trained
using such sentences as "The frog got tammed by the stove," we
also sometimes said things such as "Look what the stove is doing."
These two modifications were made to afford children every
opportunity to be productive with their newly learned verbs as
adults put them under discourse pressure to use them in the
opposite construction.
Method
Participants. Twenty children (mean age = 34.0 months, range =
32-37 months; 10 boys and 10 girls) were recruited from the same sources
as Study 1. Two girls did not use the novel verbs during the course of the
experiment and were replaced. The children in Study 2 were of the same
basic age as the younger children in Study 1.
Materials and design. The novel verbs and actions were identical to
those of Study 1. Additional puppets and objects were used for both
meeking and tamming to make it possible for either an animate or inani-
mate puppet (e.g., fish, squirrel, airplane, grapes) to act on either an
animate or inanimate object (e.g., Mickey Mouse, dinosaur, apple, car).
Each child heard one verb used only in the active transitive construction
and the other verb only in the passive construction, with training in both
cases proceeding generally as in Study 1. The assignment of verbs to
constructions was counterbalanced across participants.
Training and elicitation procedures. The training procedures were
Table 7
Average Numbers of Full and Truncated Passive Utterances and Percentage of Children Who Produced Them
in the Two Experimental Conditions of Study 2 (N = 20)
Question type
Neutral Patient
Full Truncated Full Truncated
Condition M M M M
Passive introduction 1.40 65 0.40 25 1.75 75 0.70
Active introduction 0.10 5 0.10 5 0.30 25 0.30
Note. Percentages indicate the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.
identical to those of Study 1 with one main exception. To encourage
children to conceptualize each event from both active and passive dis-
course perspectives, we introduced "mismatching" comments for each verb
during training. When the novel verb was presented in a passive construc-
tion, agent comments (e.g., "Look at what [agent] is doing!") were made.
When the novel verb was presented in the active transitive construction,
patient comments ("Look what's happening to [patient]!") were made.
Mismatching comments were provided in the 6th through 10th sequences
of models of Session 1 and the 2 sequences of Session 2. Elicited produc-
tion, consisting of agent-focused, patient-focused, and neutral questions
presented in a randomized order, took place at the end of the second
session, as in Study 1.
Observational and analytic procedures. Children's responses in the
elicited production task were recorded and tabulated as in Study 1. Fre-
quencies of passive, active transitive, and intransitive utterances containing
the novel verbs, as well as utterances containing English verbs, were
analyzed using ANOVAs for repeated measures. Because each child ex-
perienced one nonce verb in the passive construction and the other in the
active transitive construction, training condition was a within-subjects
variable in this study (in contrast to Study 1 in which it was a between-
subjects variable). As in Study 1, children had three chances to answer each
of the three types of questions for each verb. Because most children, at
least once or twice, produced more than one utterance in response to a
question, the actual number of utterances observed for a given question
type and exposure condition sometimes exceeded three.
Results
As in Study 1, we look first at children's passive utterances, then
at their active transitive utterances, then at their intransitive utter-
ances, then at their utterances with English verbs, and finally at
their use of pronouns in the two target constructions.
Passives. Table 7 presents the average numbers of full and
truncated passive utterances produced in the elicited production
task. These data were analyzed in a mixed-design ANOVA with
passive type (full vs. truncated), question type (neutral, patient,
agent), and training condition (passive vs. active) as within-
subjects variables. First, children's tendency to use the novel verbs
in the passive construction varied greatly as a function of training
condition, F(l, 19) = 36.46,p < .001. Fifteen children (75%) used
the verb they experienced in the passive construction in passive
sentences (averaging just under five utterances per child), whereas
only 8 children (40%) used the verb they experienced in the active
transitive construction in a passive sentence (averaging less than
one utterance per child). Frequencies of passives also varied as a
Agent Total
Full Truncated Full Truncated Combined
M M M M M
35 0.35 30 0.25 15 3.50 75 1.35 35 4.85 75
20 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.40 25 0.40 20 0.80 40
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
function of the question posed, with the vast majority of children's
passives coming in response to neutral or patient-focused ques-
tions (89%). This effect was highly significant, F(2, 38) = 20.92,
p < .001, with planned comparisons indicating that children pro-
duced more passives in response to patient-focused questions than
for neutral or agent-focused questions, and more passives in re-
sponse to neutral questions than agent-focused ones, Fs(l, 38) s
5.33.ps < .05. There was also a significant interaction between the
variables of training condition and question type, F(2, 38) =
12.24, p < .05, which was due to the fact that children produced
few passive utterances with the active-introduced verb, irrespec-
tive of what question was posed, whereas for the passive-
introduced verb, they produced over four times as many passive
utterances in response to patient-focused questions than agent-
focused questions. Also, children produced more full than trun-
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cated passives, F(l, 19) = 5.45, p < .05, especially with the
passive-introduced verb, resulting in an interaction of training
condition and passive type, F(2, 38) = 7.62, p < .05. Lastly, the
three-way interaction of training condition, passive type, and ques-
tion type reached significance, F(2, 38) = 4.19, p < .05, presum-
ably a consequence of floor effects for the active-introduced verb.
As in Study 1, children sometimes made errors with their
passive utterances. Children produced an average of 2.4 passive
errors each, with 75% of the children producing at least one
passive error. Reversal errors were the most common and ac-
counted for 50% of all passive errors. Twelve children (60%)
produced at least one reversal error, with 75% of reversals in
response to the agent-focused questions. The second most frequent
type of passive error, comprising over 27% of all the passive
errors, involved usage of the wrong experimental verb. These
errors were produced by 3 children (15%) who on numerous
occasions incorrectly used the passive-introduced nonce verb in a
passive construction to answer the neutral and patient-focused
questions for the activity associated with the active-introduced
verb. For example, while correctly saying "Big Bird meeked the
ball" in answering the agent-focused questions, the children
switched to the opposite verb and construction, for instance, by
saying "It got tammed by Big Bird," when responding to neutral or
patient-focused questions. These errors indicate another means by
which children showed sensitivity to the discourse demands of the
questions, while being conservative with the verb-argument struc-
ture they heard for each of the experimental verbs. The remaining
errors were similar to those of Study 1: Three children made the
error of omitting the verb in an otherwise correct passive construc-
tion (17% of passive errors overall), and 3 children used an
Table 8
Average Numbers of Active Transitive Utterances and Percentage of Children Who Produced
Them in the Two Experimental Conditions of Study 2 (N = 20)
Neutral
Condition M %
Passive introduction 0.20 15
Active introduction 1.65 70
Note. Percentages indicate the percentage of children who produced at least one utterance of a given type.
39
incorrect nominal in an otherwise correct passive sentence (6% of
total).
Active transitive utterances. Table 8 presents the average
numbers of active transitive utterances produced in the elicited
production task. These data were analyzed in a mixed-design
ANOVA with question type (neutral, patient, agent) and training
condition (passive vs. active) as within-subjects variables. First,
children's tendency to use the novel verbs in the active transitive
construction varied greatly as a function of training condition, F(l,
19) = 40.73, p < .001. Eighteen children (90%) used the verb they
experienced in the active transitive construction in active transitive
sentences (averaging just over five utterances per child), whereas
only 7 children (35%) used the verb they experienced in the
passive construction in an active transitive sentence (averaging
less than one utterance per child). Two of these children used the
passive-introduced novel verb in the active transitive construction
only, never once using the passive construction for the verb they
heard used in this way. In the ANOVA there was also a main effect
of question type, F(2, 38) = 18.45, p < .001: Children produced
more active transitive utterances in response to agent-focused
questions than for neutral or patient-focused questions, and more
for neutral questions than for patient-focused ones, Fs(l, 38) ==
6.11, ps < .05. In addition to the main effects, the interaction of
training condition and question type was significant, F(l, 38) =
8.78, p < .001, because the effect of question type was less
pronounced for the passive-introduced novel verb (as a result of a
floor effect).
Children produced a total of 18 errors involving the active
transitive construction, with 40% of the children producing at least
one error. Reversals, with the patient nominal in the preverbal
position and the agent postverbal, accounted for 13 of the chil-
dren's errors and were produced by 25% of the children. As
expected, the majority (71%) of reversal errors occurred in re-
sponse to patient-focused questions. The remaining five errors
involved usage of the wrong nonce verb or nominal.
Intransitives. Matching the results of Study 1, children in
Study 2 rarely used the novel verbs in intransitive utterances. Of
the 16 intransitive utterances produced by 9 children (45%), 14
were referentially ambiguous. In one utterance the agent was
expressed as the subject, and in one the patient was subject.
Frequencies of intransitive utterances were analyzed in a repeated-
measures ANOVA with within-subjects variables of training con-
dition and question type. No significant effects were found. The
low frequency of intransitive usages of the novel verbs here and in
Study 1 provides additional confirmation of children's conserva-
Question type
Patient Agent Total
M % M % M %
0.10 5 0.50 30 0.80 35
0.85 55 2.65 85 5.15 90
 40 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO

tism with respect to using the nonce verbs in a novel construction.
It should be noted, however, that the percentage of children in
Study 2 who produced at least one novel intransitive utterance with
an experimental verb was more than double the percentage ob-
served in Study 1.
English verbs. English verbs were used in place of one or both
of the experimental verbs by 13 children (65%). Children produced
a total of 62 utterances containing familiar English verbs, with an
average of 1.65 English verb substitutions per child for the
passive-introduced novel verb, and 1.45 English verb substitutions
per child for the active-introduced verb. In all of these utterances,
English verbs occurred in the active voice, either in transitive or
intransitive constructions. Usages of English verbs were rather
evenly distributed across question types, and a repeated-measures
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percent of the children learned to use a nonce verb with the passive
construction, producing mostly full rather than truncated passives
(averaging over five passive utterances per child), and 95% of the
children learned to use a nonce verb with the active transitive
construction (averaging over five active transitive utterances per
child). These values are only slightly lower than those for the
younger group of Study 1, even though in Study 2 the children
experienced the two experimental verbs in two different construc-
tions. (Although there were the same number of models per verb
in the two studies, in Study 1 a given child experienced twice as
many utterances that were either passive or active because they
experienced both verbs in the same construction.)
In comparison with Study 1, more children in Study 2 demon-
strated an understanding of the active transitive construction that

ANOVA revealed no significant effects. was clearly verb-general. In Study 1, only 20% of the younger
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Use of pronouns. As in Study 1, children's utterances were
categorized with respect to whether the two main nominals were
expressed with full nouns or pronouns or were omitted altogether.
Table 9 presents the frequencies of each subtype of passive and
active transitive utterance with respect to children's use of pro-
nouns and full nouns. In their full passive utterances, children used
a full noun to express the agent in the Zry-phrase 92% of the time.
In contrast, they used a full noun to express the patient-subject in
only 36% of their full passive utterances and in only 6% of their
truncated passives. In their active transitive utterances, children
used full nouns for the agent-subject 29% of the time and for the
patient-object 85% of the time. Overall, pronoun use was very
similar to that found in Study 1.
Discussion
As in Study 1, in the present study we successfully taught
English-speaking children below 3 years of age to produce passive
and active transitive utterances with nonce verbs. Seventy-five
children who were trained to use the nonce verbs in the passive
construction ever produced an active transitive utterance with a
passive-introduced verb. In the present study, that value increased
to 35%, presumably on account of the two experimental modifi-
cations we made: (a) having children learn one verb in each of two
constructions and (b) helping children to see each event from both
the agent's and patient's perspective during training.
With respect to the productivity of the passive, the value was
considerably higher in this study as well. In the first study, only 1
younger child (12%) who was trained to use the nonce verbs in the
active transitive construction produced a passive utterance. The
major finding of Study 2 was that, with our new procedures, 40%
of the children produced at least one passive sentence with their
active-trained verb. Five of these 8 children produced full passives,
with the others producing truncated passives only, usually with
pronouns (e.g., "It got meeked"). Finally, of the sample of 20
children in the second study, 4 were productive with both the
passive and active transitive constructions.

Table 9
Percentages of Passive and Active Transitive Utterances of Each Subtype Produced by Children in Experiment 2 (N = 20)

Subtype Example Neutral Patient Agent Combined

Full passive % of all full passives

1. P got V by A "The car got meeked by the frog" 19.2 12.8 2.6 34.6
2. P got V by pronoun "The car got meeked by that" 0.0 0.0 1.3 1.3
3. Pronoun got V by A "It got meeked by the frog" 10.3 17.9 1.3 29.5
4. Pronoun got V by pronoun "It got meeked by that" 0.0 3.8 0.0 3.8
5. Pronoun got V by [omitted] "It got meeked by the..." 0.0 0.0 1.3 1.3
6. Got V by A "Got meeked by the frog" 7.7 16.7 3.8 28.2
7. Got V by pronoun "Got meeked by that" 1.3 0.0 0.0 1.3

Truncated passive '•> of all truncated passives

1. Pgot V "The car got meeked" 0.0 0.0 5.7 5.7
2. Pronoun got V "It got meeked" 17.1 51.4 5.7 74.3
3. Got V "Got meeked" 11.4 5.7 2.9 20.0

Active transitive % of all active transitive utterances

1. A V P "The frog meeked the car" 13.4 6.7 5.9 26.0
2. A V pronoun "The frog meeked it" 0.8 0.8 0.8 2.5
3. Pronoun V P "He meeked the car" 10.9 3.4 21.8 36.1
4. Pronoun V pronoun "He meeked it" 1.7 2.5 4.2 8.4
5. V P "Meeked the car" 4.2 1.7 16.8 22.7
6. V pronoun "Meeked it" 0.0 0.8 3.4 4.2

Note. P = patient (full noun); V = verb; A = agent (full noun).

 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
The improved performance of the almost 3-year-old children in
Study 2 can be attributed, in part, to the effect of priming both
constructions. That is, repeatedly hearing the verbs used in passive
and active transitive constructions encouraged children to use both
of these constructions in their subsequent utterances. This finding
bears a striking resemblance to the syntactic priming phenomenon
studied extensively by Bock and her colleagues with adults (e.g.,
Bock, 1986, 1989; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock, Loebell, &
Morey, 1992). Bock and colleagues have consistently found that
adults tend to repeat the syntactic constructions that have been
primed in their experiments. For instance, after repeating a passive
description of an event such as Five people were carried by the
boat, adults tend to describe a new picture with a passive sentence.
Likewise, active priming sentences tend to be followed by active-
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voice picture descriptions (Bock et al., 1992). In the present study,
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children heard approximately 100 active sentences and 100 passive
sentences with the novel verbs. By allowing children to hear one
nonce verb in an active transitive construction and another in a
passive construction (rather than two verbs in the same construc-
tion), we almost doubled the percentage of children who produc-
tively used the active transitive construction, and more than tripled
the percentage of children who productively used the passive
construction with a newly learned verb. Furthermore, this im-
provement was in spite of the fact that the children in Study 2 had
only half as many opportunities to use an active-introduced verb in
a passive construction or a passive-introduced verb in an active
transitive construction. Overall, of the younger children in Stud-
ies 1 and 2, only 18% in Study 1 exhibited productivity with either
the active transitive or passive construction, as compared with 55%
of the children in Study 2. This difference is statistically reliable,
^ ( 1 , N = 48) = 7.24, p < .01. It is possible that still more direct
priming would increase the percentage of children productively
using the active transitive and passive constructions even further.
We should also note that the majority of children, even those
who were not productive with the passive and active transitive
constructions, showed sensitivity to the focus of the agent and
patient-focused questions in the same general ways as in Study 1.
Children produced the greatest number of active transitive utter-
ances in response to agent-focused questions with the fewest in
response to patient-focused questions. Conversely, they most often
used the passive construction when answering patient-focused
questions and least often in response to agent-focused questions.
When children did use a full passive in response to an agent-
focused question, they frequently made reversal errors by putting
the patient in thefey-phrase.On occasion, they used the appropriate
construction to answer a question, but they did so with the wrong
verb. As in Study 1, children were clearly searching for ways to
balance discourse demands and use of the verb-argument struc-
tures they had heard used with particular verbs.
In contrast to the results of Study 1, the results of Study 2
suggest that quite a few English-speaking children below 3 years
of age have constructed abstract schema for the passive and
active-transitive constructions to which they can assimilate newly
learned verbs relatively quickly. Children at this age are aware that
particular types of questions make discourse demands for placing
agents and patients in particular syntactic positions in any linguis-
tic response that might be made, and they use a variety of syntactic
strategies to meet such discourse demands.
41
General Discussion
The results of these two studies demonstrate that English-
speaking children under 3 years of age can learn to use the passive
construction relatively easily. Although the passive construction,
especially the full passive, is demonstrably more complex than the
active transitive construction, young children can learn to produce
it with a nonce verb in less than 1 hr. This fact suggests that the
main reason for the relative paucity of full passive utterances in the
language of young English-speaking children is that they have
very few of the kinds of learning experiences with which we
provided them in the present experiments. It is certainly not the
case that taking a discourse perspective on an event opposite to the
one that they are used to taking (i.e., from the perspective of the
patient rather than the agent) presents them with any serious
difficulties. Young children also seem to appreciate many of the
discourse properties of passives, both in the sense that they can
identify the kinds of discourse situations in which it is used most
appropriately and in the sense that they can use pronouns in the
construction in discourse-appropriate ways.
Some of the children (12% in Study 1 and 40% in Study 2) were
productive with the passive construction in the sense that they
were able to use it with a nonce verb that they had experienced
only in an active transitive construction. Indeed, 25% of the
children in Study 2 produced a full passive sentence with the nonce
verb they had never heard in that construction. It should be noted
that the verbs children passivized productively in the present
studies were all highly prototypical transitive verbs. It is likely that
they would have had considerably more trouble with less proto-
typically transitive verbs (e.g., experiential verbs such as see)
because young children use these in passives less often in their
spontaneous speech (Gordon & Chafetz, 1990) and have poor
comprehension of passives with experiential verbs (Sudhalter &
Braine, 1985).
Even though less than half of the children used an active-
introduced verb in the passive construction, virtually all of the
children demonstrated an understanding that certain kinds of ques-
tions call for a response in which the real-world patient of the
target action should be the sentence subject of their reply. Thus,
when they heard sentences of the type "Ernie is tamming the boat,"
(and all sentences with tarn were of this type) and then were asked
"What happened to the boat?," children did things such as use a
known English verb that described the action of the patient (e.g.,
fall down); make reversal errors in which they kept the active
voice they had heard with tamming while reversing the agent and
patient inappropriately; or, in a few cases in the second study,
actually use the nonce verb that they had just learned in the passive
even though it was clearly semantically inappropriate. Altogether,
60% of the almost 3-year-olds in Study 2 either used the active-
introduced verb in a passive construction or else made a reversal
error involving the active transitive construction; thus, the majority
of the children actively varied word order in response to discourse
pressure to make the patient be the sentence subject.
Children were also able to learn nonce verbs in the active
transitive construction quite readily. In Study 1, over half of older
children (around 3.5 years) used this construction productively
with a passive-introduced verb, and some of the younger children
(20% in Study 1 and 35% in Study 2) showed productive transfer
as well. However, the younger children were no more productive
 42 BROOKS AND TOMASELLO
with the active transitive construction than they were with the
passive (and only 20% of the children in Study 2 were productive
with both- constructions). It should be emphasized that when the
verb was introduced in a passive construction, children used a
variety of syntactic strategies to answer the mismatching agent-
focused questions. Indeed, in Study 2, 85% of the almost 3-year-
olds either used the passive-introduced verb in an active transitive
construction or else reversed the positions of the agent and patient
within the passive construction (resulting in a passive reversal
error). Hence, the overwhelming majority of children in Study 2
productively varied word order in response to discourse pressure to
produce a sentence with the agent as subject.
The finding that only a minority of the almost 3-year-olds used
a passive-introduced verb in an active transitive construction may
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seem surprising because presumably, they have been producing a
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variety of active transitive utterances for some months. A plausible
interpretation is that the children may have a generalized active
transitive construction, but they cannot get to it from hearing a
word used in a construction that is not a central component of their
productive grammatical system. Indeed, the children might have
abstract passive and active transitive constructions, but it may be
difficult for them to get from one to the other if they are not
connected pieces of knowledge. The current findings fit well with
other recent studies in which children have been taught nonce
verbs in other constructions and then are put in situations that call
for an active transitive utterance. For example, Olguin and Toma-
sello (1993) could not get young 2-year-olds to produce fully
transitive utterances with any of several nonce verbs taught to
them in various ways. Akhtar and Tomasello (1997) taught 2- and
3-year-old children nonce verbs in a presentational format ("This
is called dacking") and then tried several different strategies for
eliciting active transitive utterances. They had no success with
children younger than 3.5 years of age (3.5-year-olds were very
productive, however). They also found that children who were
almost 3 years old could not even comprehend reversible active
transitive sentences with nonce verbs; that is, after having heard
"This is called dacking" they could not act out appropriately the
sentence "Big Bird is dacking Cookie Monster." Indeed, in the
present study more children at around 3 years of age productively
created active transitive utterances than in Akhtar and Tomasello
(1997). Children may have had greater success in the present study
because they were asked to produce an active transitive utterance
with a verb they had heard used with the passive, which contained
both of the arguments to be used in the active transitive (so that
they just had to rearrange them), whereas in Akhtar and Tomasello
(1997), children had to generate new argument roles that they had
not heard used with the new verb.
Our results are consistent with the view that children's earliest
syntactic constructions are structured by the particular verbs or
predicative terms they occur with (Tomasello, 1992). The abstract-
ness of children's early constructions, and thus the source of their
earliest productivity, appears to come primarily from their argu-
ment slots. Thus, from their very first word combinations, young
children can learn a nonce noun in one semantic role (or in a
presentational format) and then use it productively in other seman-
tic roles with other verbs they have never heard it used with
(Tomasello, Akhtar, Dodson, & Rekau, 1997; Tomasello & Ol-
guin, 1993). This leads to such things as the famous "All gone
sticky" and other productive combinations early in language de-
velopment (Braine, 1963). It should be noted that children
around 3 years of age do sometimes produce utterances in which
they use verbs with constructions in a productive manner, as
documented by Bowerman (1982, 1988), among others. These are
such things as "Don't giggle me" and "He get died." But perusal
of the relevant studies finds that these are extremely rare for
children under 3 years of age, which accords with the findings of
the present study that only some very young children have suffi-
cient flexibility with the basic syntactic constructions to produce
novel verb-construction combinations with newly learned verbs.
Although the discourse circumstances of this type of overgeneral-
ization error are not always reported in full, it is typically the case
that they occur under the kinds of discourse pressure we have used
in this study, and so, like adults under certain kinds of discourse
pressure (e.g., sports announcers), the children produce "one-shot
innovations" with the limited resources at their disposal (Braine &
Brooks, 1995).
In all of the studies in which we and other researchers have
given 2-year-old children nonce verbs in various syntactic con-
structions, the consistent finding is that children of this age are
extremely conservative with new verbs, using them almost exclu-
sively in the syntactic constructions in which they have heard
others use them (although they have the ability to substitute
nominals freely). Thus, even at the earliest stages of language
acquisition, children seem to keep track of how particular verbs are
used in particular sentence types. Learning which verbs may occur
in which constructions is a necessary component of attaining
mastery of a language, and recent constraint-based models of
language comprehension (e.g., MacDonald, 1994; MacDonald,
Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garn-
sey, 1994; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993) have shown how
adults' knowledge of the frequency with which particular verbs
occur in particular constructions affects their on-line syntactic
decision making (e.g., when resolving syntactic ambiguities).
Speakers of a language seem to store knowledge of how verbs are
used at several levels of generality simultaneously—the most
important of these being verbs as lexical items, with their idiosyn-
cratic patterns of syntactic marking, and syntactic constructions as
meaning-bearing elements in their own right (Tomasello &
Brooks, in press). The present findings mesh well with this mul-
tilevel approach by demonstrating that very young children are
highly attuned to how individual verbs are used in sentence con-
structions, and they vary their usage of verbs by closely following
adult patterns of usage. Many of the children also provided evi-
dence of abstract syntactic constructions by using the novel verbs
in ways in which they had never before heard them used.
We know little about how children come to have abstract
syntactic constructions, and, to our knowledge, the process has not
yet been systematically investigated in children's early language
development. We do know that children have a strong preference
to use their newly learned verbs in the same constructions in which
they have heard others use them. Our hypothesis is that the process
of constructing abstract syntactic constructions is very similar to
the process by which children come to have other kinds of abstract
linguistic structures such as past-tense markers (cf. Braine, 1971,
1988; MacWhinney, 1978; Plunkett & Marchman, 1991). The
main idea is that children register linguistic features and patterns in
memory as a function of the frequency with which these linguistic
entities are encountered. The key is to view syntactic constructions
 YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN TO PRODUCE PASSIVES
such as the passive and the active transitive as wholistic linguistic
entities that may themselves be categorized (Braine & Brooks,
1995; Goldberg, 1995; Tomasello & Brooks, in press). With this
perspective, the proposal is simply that children's initial construc-
tions are organized around individual verbs, and on the basis of
some kind of similarity (perhaps "structure mapping" of the type
proposed by Gentner & Markman, 1997), they go on to form more
abstract and verb-general constructions. Precisely how they do this
is not known at this time, but it is clear that children have to be able
to recognize when the same construction is occurring with a
number of different verbs.
A child might start by noting semantic similarities among the
different verbs that appear in the same construction while at the
same time noting similarities in the thematic roles of the particular
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nominals involved and their positions with respect to the verb. The
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child might identify regularities in how familiar verbs are syntac-
tically marked, and may register on an item-by-item basis whether
a new verb fits the emerging pattern. At this point, the construction
may exist in a state that does not support productive transfer, but
nonetheless makes it easier to assimilate a new verb to that
construction than if there were no regularities noted at all. That is,
in the present study, some of the children may have had construc-
tions that were abstract enough to facilitate their acquisition of the
syntactic marking of a new verb even if they never used the verb
in a construction that was different from the one in which it was
introduced. Thus, at the earliest stages of schema formation, the
child may identify constructions as recurrent syntactic patterns,
and still may exhibit conservative behavior with respect to using
individual verbs only in the particular constructions in which they
have heard others use them. Possibly some notion of "critical
mass" is involved in which a certain number of verbs of a certain
type must be individually learned in a certain construction before
the child is willing to generate novel verb-construction combina-
tions (Marchman & Bates, 1994). It is at this point, and only at this
point, that problems of overgeneralization become an issue—with
the precise age being different for different constructions. At this
point, children need to learn how to constrain the productivity of
their constructions in conventional ways, either by identifying
semantic criteria associated with small subclasses of verbs (Brooks
& Tomasello, 1998; Pinker, 1989) or else by attending to some
dimensions of adult use of the construction (Braine & Brooks,
1995; Brooks & Tomasello, 1998; Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, &
Lewis, in press; Goldberg, 1995).
In this study, we have shown that young children can learn to
use a nonce verb in the full passive construction fairly readily.
They appreciate many of the discourse properties of passives in the
sense that they use passives primarily in discourse-appropriate
situations, and they use pronouns in the construction in discourse-
appropriate ways. By 3 years of age, some children have an
understanding of the passive construction that is general enough to
support their production of passives with verbs that they have
never heard used in the passive construction, and is abstract
enough that it can be primed (Bock, 1986). However, not all
children in the present study displayed such flexibility in their use
of the passive construction. The processes by means of which
young children begin to both construct and constrain each of their
verb-general syntactic constructions remain a topic for future
investigation.
43
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Received November 20, 1997
Revision received May 5, 1998
Accepted May 5, 1998