Language Acquisition

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Capturing the Evasive Passive
Stephen Crain , Rosalind Thornton & Keiko Murasugi
To cite this article: Stephen Crain , Rosalind Thornton & Keiko Murasugi (2009) Capturing the
Evasive Passive, Language Acquisition, 16:2, 123-133, DOI: 10.1080/10489220902769234
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10489220902769234

Published online: 30 Mar 2009.

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Language Acquisition, 16:123–133, 2009
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1048-9223 print/1532-7817 online
DOI: 10.1080/10489220902769234

ACQUISITION ARCHIVES

Capturing the Evasive PassiveStephen Crain, Rosalind Thornton, and Keiko Murasugi
University of Connecticut

In the 1980s, researchers in child language devised several new experimental techniques to assesschildren’s emerging linguistic competence. Innovations in methodology were needed to bridge theapparent gap between the expectation of rapid language acquisition, based on linguistic theory,and the protracted acquisition that was being witnessed using the tools and tasks available at thetime. This article discusses the use of elicited production in charting the course of developmentof verbal passives, a linguistic structure that was thought to be late developing (e.g., Borer &Wexler 1987). We compare the findings from an elicited production study with the findings fromother tasks. We conclude that verbal passives emerge earlier in children’s grammar than had beenpreviously recognized, thereby bringing data from experimental studies of child language more inline with the expectations of linguistic theory.

In response to the many critics of President Reagan’s handling of the Iran-Contra affair, heoffered the following concession: “Mistakes were made.” In the press, the form of Reagan’s
concession was referred to as the “evasive passive.” Linguists, of course, refer to it in lesspejorative terms, as the truncated or reduced passive. In several recent experiments, we haveinvestigated the acquisition of this form of the passive, as it relates to the full verbal passive. Our
primary interest is in the full verbal passive, since this form is so often evaded in research on language acquisition. There seems to be a general consensus among acquisitionists that preschool
children, like President Reagan, have great difficulty using full verbal passives. Given that thetheory of generative grammar postulates innate linguistic constraints on grammar formation,
children should be expected to produce and comprehend a host of linguistic constructions on
the basis of little, if any, environmental evidence. Thus, the acquisition of the passive can be
Correspondence should be sent to Stephen Crain, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Building C5C, North
Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: scrain@maccs.mq.edu.au This Acquistion Archives article was originally presented at the Boston University Conference on Language
Development in 1987. It was not previously published.

123

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regarded as a test case for the theory. We can compare its predictions with the outcome thatwould be expected according to other approaches, e.g., ones that would characterize the courseof language acquisition in learning-theoretic terms. We will present evidence that children, atleast, have complete mastery of the passive. The results from the elicitation study therefore
provide strong support for the precepts of generative grammar.
Here is how we will proceed. First, we will sketch out the learnability issues surrounding
the acquisition of truncated and full passives. In setting out the issues, we closely follow thediscussion presented in Borer and Wexler’s (1987) article “The Maturation of Syntax,” whichcontains a clear and insightful statement of alternative accounts of the acquisition process ingeneral, and the acquisition of the passive in particular. Then we turn to three experiments wehave conducted, which attempt to pin down more precisely the course of acquisition of thefull verbal passive. Since our experimental results are not consistent with the current pictureof the acquisition of the full verbal passive, we then try to explain the disparity between
our data and those of earlier research on which the current picture is based. We present
evidence that at least one of these methodologies—the act-out D toy manipulation paradigm—
seriously underestimates the linguistic competence of young children. We believe that thisis also true of other methods of assessing acquisition that have been used in past research,
including children’s spontaneous productions and their descriptions of pictures. Finally, we
discuss the implications of our findings. We argue that our findings support a simple versionof the innateness hypothesis which supposes that children have early knowledge of many
grammatical facts, which far outstrips what they could be expected to have mastered on thebasis of their linguistic experience. More specifically, we argue that our data call into question
the common assumption that children proceed through a stage of acquisition at which children’s
grammars can generate reduced passives (or possibly, only adjectival passives) but not fullverbal passives with ‘by-phrases.’ This assumption of stepwise acquisition is critical for several
theoretical proposals about the acquisition of syntax, as we now show.
One of the central goals of language acquisition research is to explain the course of language
development. Since language takes several years to grow, we must explain how child languagechanges over time. Of course, the explanation that is offered must also be responsive to otherfacts about the acquisition process; in particular, the fact that every child rapidly converges ona grammatical system that is equivalent to everyone else’s, despite a considerable latitude in
linguistic experience—indeed, without any relevant experience at all in some instances. Innate
formal principles of language acquisition are clearly needed to explain these basic facts. But
despite the recourse to innate principles within which children construct their grammaticalsystem, some structures appear later in the course of acquisition than others. For instance,much research suggests that truncated passives appear before full verbal passives. Resolutionof this dilemma is especially important when the late emerging structures involve putatively
universal principles of grammar. In the case of passives, it is generally assumed that theability to form A-chains is innate. Since rapid and direct acquisition would seem to be
anticipated by current linguistic theory, the fact that acquisition takes the form that it doespresses for an explanation. And several accounts for the slow acquisition puzzle have beenoffered.
At first cut, the proposals can be divided into linguistic and nonlinguistic accounts. One
linguistic explanation involves intrinsic ordering of linguistic principles, or linguistic modules.
Following Borer & Wexler (1987), we will pass over this solution on the grounds that it

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125

lacks empirical support, and because current linguistic theory has abandoned the ordering ofprinciples. Another linguistic solution invokes maturation. This proposal, which is favored byBorer & Wexler (1987), maintains that some aspects of syntactic knowledge, while innate, are
yet undeveloped at birth, and may take some years to mature. Specifically, they propose that the
principle of A-chain formation that underlies verbal passives undergoes maturational change.
They maintain that before a critical level of maturation is reached, children will be unable
to produce verbal passives. At earlier stages their productions should be limited to adjectival
passives. While we do not question the logic behind the maturation hypothesis, we have foundempirical grounds to question it, which we will present shortly.
But first we should consider the nonlinguistic accounts of the order of acquisition of syntax.
These explanations suppose that children come equipped at birth with all of the principles ofuniversal grammar (UG), but that the appearance of certain linguistic principles is delayed byextraneous factors. One nonlinguistic factor that could delay acquisition is the availability ofthe data that are needed to advance beyond the current stage of acquisition. Both the empiricalfacts and the logic of the situation weigh against this, however. We can question this proposal
from a logical point of view since, if the data were not readily available, then they would not
suffice to ensure that every child will eventually converge on the adult system (Lasnik & Crain
1985).
Finally, there is a nonlinguistic counterpart to the maturation hypothesis advanced by Borer& Wexler (1987). It could be proposed, for instance, that all of the principles and parameters of
UG are innate, and even present at birth, but held in check until some nonlinguistic cognitive
system matures. One candidate for such a nonlinguistic mechanism is the verbal working
memory system, which is known to increase in efficiency during the course of language
acquisition. The difficulty with this proposal is that it isn’t obvious to see how the maturation ofa general purpose device such as working memory can explain the specific details of language
development.
All of the proposals we have just sketched presuppose that child language acquisition
proceeds in a stepwise fashion, beginning at the earliest stages with the mastery of a setof constructions and gradually extending this set to include ones that were unavailable, for
one reason or another, at earlier stages. We have found reasons in our previous research toquestion this assumption in several cases. We will give evidence in this paper that the passive
construction is not acquired piecemeal.
While we concede the point made by Borer & Wexler (1987) about nonlinguistic maturation,
we believe it is important to take seriously the role of nonsyntactic performance factors. We havedemonstrated previously (e.g., Hamburger & Crain 1982, 1984) and will demonstrate again herethat these cognitive processes play a substantial role in determining the outcome of assessmentsof children’s linguistic competence. For instance, we have shown that, in act-out tasks, it is
crucial to pay attention to the satisfaction of presuppositions and to the formation of an action
plan in response to the linguistic construction under investigation. Both of these cognitive
processes are involved in an act-out task, in addition to the assignment of syntactic structure.
This means that these cognitive processes may be the source of children’s comprehension
failures in certain circumstances.
For several syntactic constructions, we have obtained evidence that the difficulties children
encounter are attributable to nonsyntactic factors. The evidence is this: when care is taken to
make sure that these factors do not present a source of difficulty for children, their failure rates

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drop dramatically. These findings are not anticipated and cannot be explained on accounts that
attribute children’s comprehension failures to a lack of grammatical competence. Instead, what
appeared to be a lack of grammatical competence was shown to receive a better accounting interms of the nonsyntactic demands that these structures impose in certain tasks.
Data obtained from children’s spontaneous productions is open to similar criticisms. For
example, the main source of data that are invoked in support of the claim that young children
master adjectival passives before verbal passives is the absence of full passives (with ‘byphrases’) in their spontaneous speech and in their descriptions of pictures (Horgan 1978).
But this is clearly not incontrovertible evidence that children’s grammars are incapable ofgenerating full passives. Full passives are rare in adult speech too, but their paucity in thiscase is not interpreted as revealing a lack of grammatical knowledge. Instead, it is attributed
to ‘performance factors’ weighing in favor of the reduced form or an alternative constructionthat is permissible in the same discourse settings. In short, the absence of full verbal passives
in adult speech is probably a consequence of the fact that situations in which the full passive is
uniquely felicitous are quite rare. But the same logic that explains why adults produce so few
full passives would seem to apply to children. Perhaps they too have mastered the linguistic
prerequisites for using this construction, but will fail to evince mastery except in circumstancesthat uniquely demand the full verbal passive.
To test for this possibility, we designed a simple experiment to elicit full verbal passives frompreschool children. Thirty-five children participated in the experiment, which involved them ina game in which one experimenter asked them to pose questions to another experimenter. The
child was asked to help teach one of the experimenters English, and to test her understandingof various “stories” which were acted-out with toys. The methodological innovation in thisstudy was to control the pragmatic context in such a way that a question with a full passive
would constitute a felicitous response. Here are examples of two protocols illustrating the basic
elicitation technique.
(1) Exp: OK, there is this big heavy bus, and it’s coming along and it crashes into one of
the cars. You ask Keiko which car.
Child: Which car gets crashen by the big bus?
(2) Exp: In this story, there are two soldiers and an alligator. And the soldiers are standing
in the water and they can’t see the alligator. And the alligator goes up and bites oneof the soldiers. You ask Keiko which one.
Child: Which one is getting bited by the alligator?
Often, these simple contexts sufficed, but when they didn’t evoke the right response, we
introduced a more complex context in which the ‘by-phrase’ was needed. The following
protocol illustrates the more complex elicitation technique.
(3) Exp: See, the Incredible Hulk is hitting one of the soldiers. Look over here. Darth
Vader goes over and hits a soldier. So Darth Vader is also hitting one of the soldiers.
You ask Keiko which one.
Child: Which soldier is getting hit by Darth Vader?
Using these techniques, we were able to elicit full verbal passives from nearly every child
we tested, including ones as young as 3;4. Appendix 1 contains sample data from 32 children.

CAPTURING THE EVASIVE PASSIVE

127

Twenty-nine of these children produced at least one full verbal passive, and 24 of them produced
three or more full passives. It is worth noting also the high frequency of the auxiliary verb
“got” in the data, the occasional appearance of prepositions other than “by,” and a numberof passive participles formed with “-en” such as ‘riden,’ ‘crashen.’ But the main point isthat we were successful in eliciting full passives in exactly the right circumstances, i.e.,
ones that are pragmatically appropriate for the passive construction. It is evident, then, thatelicited production studies yield critical information about children’s pairings of sentences andmeanings. In this study, we tried to create situations in which the meaning corresponding to
the full verbal passive was uniquely felicitous in the circumstances. The fact that children
produced the appropriate sentences in these circumstances constitutes compelling evidence of
their grammatical competence with this syntactic construction. Children’s consistently adultlike combinations of words is unlikely to have come about by accident, since there are so many
ways to combine words incorrectly.
We also tested the same children who participated in the elicited production task using two
standard comprehension measures, an act-out task and a picture verification task. We gave halfof the children the elicited production task first, and then the two comprehension tasks. The
other half received them in the opposite order, so they were given the comprehension tasks
first. The results of the picture-verification are consistent with the findings from the elicitedproduction technique. However, the act-out task resulted in much poorer performance from thechild subjects, as compared to the picture verification task and the elicited production task.
The comparison of overall performance on the act-out task and the picture verification task
is provided in Table 1. This table shows that the act-out task, like the data from children’s
spontaneous production, severely underestimates children’s knowledge of the passive. Moredetailed findings from both tasks are presented in Tables 2 and 3.
We also conducted a study using a truth-value judgment task to test children’s knowledgeof the passive. Ten child subjects were tested using this technique, with an average age of 4;7.
The experimental materials included reversible passives, as in (4) and (5).
(4) Passive sentences (“Yes” Trials)
a. The Incredible Hulk was kicked by the guard.
b. The zebra was kissed by the giraffe.
c. The car was pushed by the bus.
(5) Passive sentences (“No” Trials)
a. The guard was kicked by the Incredible Hulk.
b. The giraffe was kissed by the zebra.
c. The bus was pushed by the car.
TABLE 1Frequency (and Percentage) of Correct Responses in
Act-Out and Picture Verification Tasks(N D 35, Mean Age D 4;4)Act-Out Task

Picture Verification

197/280 (70.3%)

159/175 (90.9%)

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TABLE 2
Act-Out Task (N D 35, Mean D 4;4)
Number of Trials Correct

No. of Children, % of Children

8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

9 (25.7%)
3 (8.6%)8 (22.9%)
4 (11.4%)
6 (17.1%)
3 (8.6%)
1 (2.9%)1 (2.9%)0 (0%)The sentences in (4) were presented following situations that conformed to their meanings, but
the sentences in (5) were incorrect descriptions of the situations acted out by the experimenter.
That is, Kermit said the wrong thing. Children gave correct “yes” responses to the sentences in(4) 93% of the time, and they correctly rejected the sentences in (5) 77% of the time. Only one
child was systematically overaccepting; the other nine children correctly rejected at least 2 of the
3 false test sentences in (5). Using the elicited production data as a benchmark for comparison,
the data from the three comprehension measures suggest that picture verification and truth-value
judgment tasks are reasonably sensitive measures of children’s linguistic competence, whereas
data from the act-out task, and the data from children’s spontaneous production, seriously
underestimate children’s linguistic competence.
It is time to take stock. We have considered a number of proposals that attempt to explain
why language acquisition appears to take so long and why children appear to acquire certain
constructions piecemeal. The results of our elicitation study show that the appearances are
misleading, at least in the case of the passive. This invites the inference that, like President
Reagan, children evade the full passive unless they are pressed hard enough. In our experiment,
we pressed children by presenting them with circumstances which required them to indicate
the agent of the action. If we can generalize from these data, this raises the possibility thatyoung children may have a lot more syntactic knowledge under their belts than they exhibit inspontaneous production or in their performance on certain comprehension measures, e.g., theact-out task. We’ll discuss this point in more detail later.
TABLE 3
Picture Verification Task (N D 35, Mean D4;4)
Number of Trials Correct

No. of Children, % of Children

5
4
3
2
1
0

25 (71.4%)4 (11.4%)
6 (17.1%)
0 (0%)
0 (0%)
0 (0%)

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First, let us return to the acquisition puzzle we began with: why acquisition appears totake so long and to take so many wrong turns. We saw that a promising solution that was
adopted in the case of passives invoked linguistic maturation. One of the virtues of thishypothesis is that it allows us to continue to adhere to the innateness hypothesis. As Borer& Wexler (1987) correctly point out, gradual acquisition and even wrong turns that do notappear to respect universal principles, do not constitute disconfirmation of the innatenesshypothesis. A linguistic principle might be innately encoded in the human brain and yet
inaccessible to a child in the early stages of language acquisition. Like aspects of physicaldevelopments of the body (e.g., the secondary sex characteristics), linguistic principles may
lie dormant for many years, biologically timed to become effective at a certain maturational
stage.
We suspect that it will eventually turn out that the innateness hypothesis must be augmented
by maturation in certain cases. But, insofar as this introduces additional degrees of freedom, theempirical claims of the innateness hypothesis are somewhat weakened. Unless some motivatedpredictions can be made about exactly when latent knowledge will become effective, theseapproaches are compatible with a much wider range of data than the simplest and strongest
version of the innateness hypothesis—viz. that children abide by universal principles at allstages of language development. The strong innateness position is surely the one to adopt in
the absence of counterevidence.
The results of the present study undercut the evidence that has been offered in favor of
the view that there is a stage at which children can generate adjectival passives but not verbal
passives. We have not proven that there is not such a stage, but we have shown that this stage
is not characteristic of 3- and 4-year-old children. This obviates the need to invoke maturation,
allowing us to retain the strong innateness hypothesis. Moreover, if these findings on the passive
are representative of the extent of young children’s grammatical knowledge, then an appeal tomaturation might be dispensed with in other places as well.
Of course, we are still a long way from giving a complete solution to the acquisition
puzzle, but the form of the solution we propose should be clear. As far as children’s comprehension is concerned, we have seen that interpreting children’s linguistic development
is complicated by the existence of a variety of potentially confounding factors. In addition
to the assignment of syntactic structure, normal sentence comprehension involves lexical,
semantic, pragmatic, planning, and inferential abilities. The failure of any one of these may
be responsible for children’s poor comprehension. Until we have an empirical means to
distinguish these various factors, however, we must be cautious in drawing the inference
from children’s imperfect performance that they are ignorant of the grammar of their target
language.
We have also seen that other cognitive processes which are intertwined with syntax inproduction can explain why production data may make it look as if children go through stages
in the acquisition of syntax, when in fact they don’t. We have examined one case in point,
showing that young children evince mastery of the full passive in experimental situations which
are uniquely felicitous for this construction. This technique has been applied in other cases,
with equal success. Henry Hamburger and Stephen Crain began by eliciting relative clauses(Hamburger & Crain 1984), and Crain (1982) did an elicited production study of temporaladverbials. Crain & Nakayama (1987) also used this approach to test Chomsky’s claim thatchildren would invariably adhere to structure-dependent principles when they began producing

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yes/no questions that contained relative clauses. Currently, Jaya Sarma and Rozz Thornton
are extending the technique of elicited production to even more complex constructions. Jaya
Sarma is using it to investigate children’s acquisition of wh-questions in main and subordinate
clauses, to look at the interplay of wh-movement and subject-Aux inversion (SAI) in clausesof both types. And Rozz Thornton is using it to look at children’s adherence to the empty
category principle (ECP), and whether children, like adults, do not contract across a trace left
by wh-movement. The goal of these studies is to provide a better chart of the course children
take in the acquisition of syntax. We believe that, in doing so, we will provide further evidencein support of the strong innateness hypothesis.
It is important to interject a caveat, however. It may not be possible to push the innatenesshypothesis too far, for reasons extraneous to syntax—having to do with nonlinguistic maturation. For example, the development of an efficient, verbal-working memory system may
establish a ceiling on children’s performance at early stages of acquisition. It may not be
possible to reduce memory load below this ceiling, so that before the nonlinguistic system has
matured to a certain point it may prove impossible to ascertain children’s linguistic competencewith whole classes of sentences—those that impose demands which exceed the capacity of theworking memory system. So far, we have not found this to be the case.
It might be useful to conclude by comparing the position we advocate with that taken by
Yukio Otsu in his investigations of subjacency (Otsu 1981). What Otsu argued was that thechildren in his studies who gave the appearance of violating innate constraints were children
who had not mastered the syntactic structures to which the constraints apply; but that as soon
as a child’s linguistic analysis reached the level of sophistication at which a universal constraint
becomes relevant, then the constraint was respected. The difference between our approach andhis is that we believe that a good case can be made, as we saw, for laying the blame for slow
acquisition on the fact that there are cognitive processes of major proportions, extraneous tosyntax, that must be mastered as well. By exonerating syntax, we invigorate the precepts ofcurrent linguistic theory, which anticipates rapid and direct acquisition of syntactic principles
on the basis of little, if any, environmental evidence.

REFERENCES
Borer, Hagit & Kenneth Wexler. 1987. The maturation of syntax. In T. Roeper & E. Williams (eds.), Parameter setting.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Crain, Stephen. 1982. Temporal terms: Mastery by age five. In Papers and Reports on Child Language Development,
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum, 33–38. Stanford University.
Crain, Stephen & Mineharu Nakayama. 1987. Structure dependence in grammar formation. Language 63. 522–543.
Hamburger, Henry & Stephen Crain. 1982. Relative acquisition. In S. A. Kuczaj (ed.) Language development: Syntax
and semantics, 245–274. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hamburger, Henry & Stephen Crain. 1984. Acquisition of cognitive compiling. Cognition 17. 85–136.
Hamburger, Henry & Stephen Crain 1987. Plans and semantics in human processing of language. Cognitive Science
11. 101–136.
Horgan, Dianne. 1978. The development of the full passive. Journal of Child Language 5. 65–80.
Lasnik, Howard & Stephen Crain. 1985. On the acquisition of pronominal reference. Lingua 65. 135–154.
Otsu, Yukio. 1981. Universal grammar and syntactic development in children: Toward a theory of syntactic development. Cambridge, MA: MIT, dissertation.

CAPTURING THE EVASIVE PASSIVE131

APPENDIX 1: PASSIVE ELICITATION TASK DATA
A sample of the full verbal passives produced by each child are listed. Some children produced many more than three.
In those few cases where the child did not produce as many as three full passives, we have listed a sample of thetruncated passives, or ‘passive-like’ structures, elicited.
Phoebe 3;4
1. She got knocked down by the Smurfie.
2. He was eaten by that ice cream.
3. They got eaten by this watermelon.
Rakiya 3;6
1. He’s going to be dead.
2. They’re getting married.
Todd 3;8
1. Which girl is pushing, getting pushed by a car?
2. Which one of those army guys is getting eat?
3. He got hurt by that guy.
Jessica 3;91. One dinosaur’s being eated from the ice cream cone.
2. Which one is not being hit by the monster?
3. He’s being flied over from that.
Kyle 3;9
1. Which car got pushed by a bus?
2. What spaceman got licked by the Smurf?
3. The car got flied over by that helicopter right there.
Michael 3;11
1. I said this guy got down by this guy.
2. Patrick got scratched by the trees two times and I got scratched one time.
3. It got pushed over by the bus, and the bus is bringing him to the “hostibul.”
Joey 3;11
1. Point to the car that’s being crashed by the helicopter.
Sam 3;11
1. The girl’s getting punched up by this guy.
2. He got picked up from her.
3. She got hitted by a car.
Jason 3;11
1. And this car comes along and got tripped up to the bus.
2. He got bleeded. (referring to pig)
3. It got turned over. (referring to car)Peter 4;1
1. He’s getting shoot by a car.
2. It’s getting ate up from Luke Skywalker.
3. It might get shoot by him.
Lucas 4;1
1. Which one is getting killed by that guy that belongs in Star Wars?
2. Which guy, spaceman got flying around by the airplane?
3. (Which elephant) is getting “rid” by that girl?

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Zachary 4;2
1. Which one got picked up by a monster guy?
2. Which one got crashed in by a Smurf?
3. Which one got shot by the army man?
Tracy 4;4
1. Which car’s getting crashed by another one?
2. What one’s getting pushed by the bus?
3. Which one’s getting kissed by the Smurf?
David 4;5
1. He’s getting pushed by the plane.
2. He’s getting knocked by a gorilla.
3. She’s getting kissed by the baby.
Scott 4;5
1. Which Gummi Bear was crashed by the car?
2. Which Gummi Bear was bite by the alligator?
3. Which kangaroo was shoot by the army man?
Lindsay 4;5
1. Which one was getting pushed by the car?
2. Which one is being kissed by Flash Gordon?
3. He’s being knocked by him.
Kyle (M) 4;5
1. The hamburger gets eaten by Strawberry Shortcake.
2. The car is crashed in by the ice cream.
3. She gets crashed by the strawberry ice cream.
Adam 4;5
1. Which giraffe is getting flied over?
2. He’s getting shooted on.
3. He’s getting “biten.”(Adam produced by-phrase if asked “by what?”)Danny 4;6l. Which one is getting pushed by the bus?
2. Which soldier’s getting bited by the brontosaurus?
3. Which one’s getting kissed by the monster?
Nina 4;6
1. Which dinosaur’s getting hit by the car?
2. Which spaceman’s getting hit by the bus?
3. Which Gummi Bear’s getting picked up by the Smurf?
(Experimenter modeled sentences before Nina produced passive structure)
Matthew 4;6
1. Which one is getting shooted from this guy?
2. Which car is getting hit?
3. He got shotted and he got killed.
Tyler 4;7
1. Which brontosaurus got flew over by the airplane?
2. Which elephant got “riden” by the Smurf?
3. The Incredible Hulk got picked up by the guard.

CAPTURING THE EVASIVE PASSIVE
Katie 4;7
1. Which car’s getting pushed around by the bus?
2. Which guy’s getting punched by the Smurf?
3. He just got jumped over by a kangaroo.
Alexandria, 4;7
1. Which girl is getting pushed by the car?
2. Which spaceman gets flew around with the airplane?
3. Which dinosaur gets bit by her?
Brendon 4;8
1. Which giraffe got bite by the tiger?
2. Which spaceman got picked up by that guy?
3. Which girl got pushed by the car?
Jimmy 4;9
1. The ice creams will be crashed.
2. It got crashed.
Chrissie 4;8
1. Do you know which spaceman is getting punched by the Incredible Hulk?
2. Point to the elephant who’s getting licked by the Cabbage Patch.
3. Point to the spaceman who’s getting standed on by the Smurf.
Megan G. 4;8
1. Which one’s getting bite by the lion?
2. Which spaceman’s getting kissed by the Smurf?
3. Which elephant’s getting flied over by the plane?
Leyna 4;9
1. Which giraffe is getting flying over by the plane?
2. Which girl gets “huggen” by this gorilla?
3. Which car gets “crashen” by this big bus?
Danielle 4;11
1. Which girl is getting punched?
(Danielle produced above only after experimenter modeled the test sentence)
Ananda 4;11
1. Which piece of fruit got eaten by the dinosaur?
2. Which ice cream got bitten by the monster?
3. Which princess got kicked by the mirror?
Kristen 5;0
1. He’s being shoot by the spaceman or whatever it is.
2. It’s being bite by the puppy.
3. Which spaceman’s being licked by?
(Kristen frequently left off the “by-NP” as in 3 above)133