Deaf Children’s Acquisition of the Passive Voice

Abstract

Ten each severely prelingually deaf boys and girls at the ages of nine–10, 11–12, 13–14, 15–16, and 17–18 years were tested for their comprehension and production of the passive voice. The comprehension tasks consisted of moving toys to demonstrate the action of a sentence, or selecting a picture showing the action of the sentence. The production task required subjects to fill the gap in a sentence with the correct set of passive markers. Significant improvement with age took place on all tasks, but even at 17–18 years only slightly more than half the children correctly understood passive sentences and less than half correctly produced such sentences. Deaf children to an advanced age interpret passive sentences in terms of the surface subject-verb-object order of their constituents. Our subjects scored lowest on a test of agent-deleted passive sentences, somewhat higher on reversible passives, and highest on nonreversible passives. By was the only passive marker for most deaf children. A small number of the youngest children interpreted active sentences in terms of object-verb-subject order.