Publication . Estrela, Antónia Pimentel; Centro de Linguística da UNL (CLUNL)
The aim of this work is to describe the acquisition of passive structures, using a grammaticality test, to assess whether children distinguish the three types of passives (eventive, resultative and stative) and their different properties. The results reveal that, at five years old, children do not show significant differences in the judgments of grammaticality assigned to various types of passive, showing chance level performance, contrarily to the performance of six-year-old children. Grammaticality contrasts are not completely understood by children, but we can already notice a statistically significant development in the recognition of the contrast between eventive and stative passives, and resultative and stative passives.
