Hello everyone. I'm Dan note. I'm a linguistics major at the University of Southern Maine. And this past year I worked with professor Dana McDaniel examining the role of the preposition by in English-speaking children's acquisition of the passive structure. To begin, we'll just look at the differences between the active and passive voice. It's the active voice is something we use most often in our everyday speech. Sentences like the dog chased the cat, or the boy, the cake, I went to the store. All of these sentences have a subject who is also the one of the Burg. The passive voice is something that is much more infrequent in our everyday language, where the object of the active voice is promoted to the subject of the passive. And the subject of the active is devoted to an object of a prepositional phrase at the end of the passage. So what that means is the active sentence in English, the dog chased the cat would become the passive sentence. The cat was chased by the dog. Know what's important to note here is that English uses the preposition by to indicate the demoted subject in the passive voice. However, this isn't the only reason we would use by in a sentence. For example, pi also means near or around, such as in the sentence, we need a picnic by the lake, meaning we ate a picnic, and that happened near or around the left. However, at this marker, various cross linguistic weave throughout the world. Some languages might use what is the equivalent of the preposition width, or through English uses by. But what's important is that these, the passive isn't the only thing that these markers are used for. Now, looking specifically at the passive in child language acquisition. Earlier findings have characterized children's acquisition, the passive, to be as such. Namely that children under five are at the age of five will perform poorly on comprehension tasks involving the passive. This could include children reversing the roles of the arguments. So for example, if they heard the sentence, the cat was chased by a dog, the participant might interpret that meaning as the cap is the one chasing the dog instead of the dog is chasing the cat. And the last characteristic important to our study was that children do especially, especially poorly on non-action verbs in the passive. So for example, the non-action verbs C might be more difficult to interpret than the actual verb chase in a passive comprehension task. What's important to note here is that this is common cross linguistic Wait. Children all over the world have difficulty acquire in the passive. However, findings from QT Yaakov and failures from a study they did on Romani speaking children show that children speakers of Romani age 35 do exceptionally well on passive comprehension test. And there are two important aspects about the Romney passive to consider here. One is that it is as infrequent structure and Romney as it is in English. And the other is that Romani marks the passive with the equivalent of the English preposition from. So a Romney passive sentence would sound like in English, or in English would sound like the cat was chased from the dog. So broadly, our research is analyzing what is the source of the apparent lack of acquisition of the passive that happens cross linguistically. And our prediction is that young children who perform poorly on passive constructions should I will correctly interpret the same constructions with the preposition from. So. Now turning to methods as far as groups and participants go, we were able to collect data from 16 child participants aged three years and two months to four years and 11 months old, as well as data from adult participants to function as control group. Unfortunately, the outbreak of covert 19 impacted our ability to collect data from a larger sample of participants. So therefore, we were able to collect enough data to run true signif, quote or a true statistical analysis. But I will present data from 16 participants that we do have. So what is it exactly that we get? We designed a picture selection task in which participants would listen to a pre-recorded sentence while they were presented with a set of pictures. And once they have finished listening to the sentence, they were asked to select the picture that fit the meaning of the sentence. As far as materials go, there were 12 test items and for filler items for a total of 16 items in the experiment, four of the test items were active sentences. Four of them were passive sentences with pi, and four of them were passives with from six of the 12 test items had actual birds and insects, have then had non-action verbs, and all the fillers were ungrammatical. This was done to balance out the number of grammatical sentences, the active and the passive sentences with I and the ungrammatical sentences with front. So there would be an equal number of grammatical and grammatical sentences in the set three set of pictures included three pictures, one of which fit the meaning of the sentence, one of which reversed the meaning, third, was included as a distracter. And finally, all of the items and pictures included the same two characters, Louis and Yele. And this was done to make sure that the participants were able to distinguish the arguments in the reference and we would know whether or not they were reversing the meaning of the sentence. The next question is, what did the session with life? And so it began, we would bring in the participant and we would sit down and we would explain what the task was going to be and what the instructions were, as well as introduce them to the characters. So we would introduce them to blue began yelling and make sure they knew who was who. And we would also introduce them to you. Sally. Sally was an elephant puppet who would deliver or produce the sentences, like I mentioned. And they were pre recorded. And there was a small Bluetooth speaker in the puppet. So it was as if she was the one saying sentences. And we introduce Sally as an elephant who was learning to speak English, which would account for the unnatural way she spoke times. Once d everything was explained and everyone was introduced, we moved on to to practice items ticket the participant used to the protocol. And once those were finished and the participant was ready, we moved onto those task were the 16 items. This is an example of what a normal test out and look like. Here we've included the verb surprise in all three conditions, as well as the three pictures each participant sought to accompany the Smurf. So that this is the active form of the sentence. Please pass the passive form with by past and the past performance from January. So as you can see, the upper left-hand picture would match the active sentence and the picture below that number three, would match the meaning of the passage. The second picture was included as the distracter. Now turning to our preliminary data, as I mentioned before, given a small number of participants, we weren't able to do a true statistical analysis, but we will look at the data we were able to collect on this slide, we have two graphs. As you can see, both the representative of group data, the left being from the child participants and the right being from adult controls. And these are the group data broken down by Senate site. So the child participants, their best overall category was the active sentences followed by bypasses and then from passes. This doesn't exactly align with our prediction totally, but we were able to further look at the data and look at the individual participants and break participants down into groups. As you can see, the adults who are almost perfect on every type of sentence, such as I just mentioned. We were able to break the participants down into smaller subgroups. As a reminder, we had 16 child participants. Six of them fell into a target group who were characterized by a score of 75% or higher on active items and a score of 50% or less on passive items with by five children fell into the adult like category. Their score on the act of items that are similar to the target group, 75% or higher. However, their scores on active or passive items with by were also higher. So they were greater than 50% on passive items. With by the last group was an other group, their five children in this group, and they received a score of 50% or less on active iTunes. And our prediction, it's important to note here, our prediction is only applicable to the target group. Presumably the adult like group has already acquired the passive. And therefore sentences with from would be a little bit more difficult to comprehend. As an addition, the other group had a little bit more difficulty interpreting the active items, so we excluded them from our data. With this in mind, we'll turn to this chart containing the average score is broken down. My sentence type. Now the data is broken down into groups. So all the way on the left, we have the overall scores, the overall average scores compared to the target's adult like and other groups respectively. As you can see, the target group has a fairly similar score on the active sentences to the adult like group, close to 90%. However, their scores on the bypasses our less than their scores on the From. And that's in the trending direction, say that they would understand from passes more than they understand that bypasses. So in terms of our prediction that these data show that the target group litters trending in favor of our prediction rule, say. Lastly, we'll turn to the results broken down by Reverb Type. As I mentioned before, children do significantly more poorly on comprehension tasks who had non-action verbs as opposed to action or action verbs. In our data, there does not seem to be a real difference between the two. As you can see, the actual on the left hand side and the non-action or on the right hand side appear to be very similar in terms of scores. In closing, there are just some remarks for further research. In terms of design edits, I might be more helpful to include a longer practice session to make sure that participants are able to totally mastered the task before beginning the experiment. Additionally, larger pictures might be more helpful, so children who are participants will easily be able to distinguish the three pictures. And of course, it would be ideal to test more subjects in order to reach significance. Thank you very much for your time and I hope you enjoyed this presentation.