ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children’s abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two classes randomly allocated to either an active sentence or a passive sentence training structure. All children were individually tested at post-training. Children in the passive condition generated 3.6 more passives than the children in the active voice condition. Pre-training language and memory abilities, as measured by both grammatical level with a standardized sentence comprehension task (TROG-2) and a verbal working memory task (Digit Span), were unrelated to number of passives produced at post training. The study supports and expands recent evidence on the benefit of rich language exposure in the classroom context and on the quick dynamic adaptation of the implicit learning mechanisms to language exposure activities.

摘要

本研究调查了基于课堂的句法训练对儿童产生被动句能力的影响。33 名单语英语儿童（平均年龄 5 岁；2 岁）参与了基于启动设计中讲故事的被动语音训练。培训在课堂环境中进行，两个班级随机分配到主动句或被动句培训结构。所有孩子在训练后都接受了单独测试。被动语态中的儿童比主动语态中的儿童多产生 3.6 个被动语态。预训练语言和记忆能力，通过标准化句子理解任务 (TROG-2) 和语言工作记忆任务 (Digit Span) 的语法水平来衡量，与训练后产生的被动数无关。该研究支持并扩展了关于课堂环境中丰富的语言接触的好处以及内隐学习机制对语言接触活动的快速动态适应的最新证据。