Passives in Thai are one that are generally marked with the adversative passive marker thuuk or doon, with full passives shown in (1) and short passive shown in (2). It is typically argued that children acquire passives much later than active sentences and may have difficulty comprehending passives in early age. Moreover, children tend to acquire passive with actional verbs earlier than those with psychological verbs (Maratsos et al. 1985). This study then aims at examining how pre-school Thai children comprehend and produce Thai passive containing verbs with adversative and actional features.
136 Monolingual preschool Thai children took part in these comprehension and production tasks for acquisition of passive construction in Thai. Adversative and non-adversative verbs as well as actional and non-actional (psychological) verbs in semantically reversible passive sentences were tested. In comprehension test, children were given four-choices picture-based tasks and asked to identify the pictures corresponding to the given passive sentences. In the production test, they were asked to describe the given pictures.
The results show that children are able to comprehend Thai passive as early as 2 years old with the accuracy rate of children’s comprehension increasing by age. In making Thai passive construction, children prefer to use short passive sentence and the passive marker doon. Children can produce passive construction with adversative verbs as early as 2-3 years old with usage increase by older age. Most passive sentences found are constructed with adversative actional verbs. Of all the verbs investigated, the adversative-actional verbs tii ‘to beat’ is the most frequently used in passive construction, followed by yìk ‘to pinch’ and kàt ‘to bite’, respectively. Non-actional (psychological) and non-adversative verbs are rarely used to construct the thùuk/doon passive construction in Thai children.
Kitima Indrambarya, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University, Thailand. She is a former dean of Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University. Her research interest is on Thai syntax and language acquisition. Her recent research is on syntactic acquisition of preschool Thai children. PRESENTATION VIDEOPRESENTATION SLIDESPRESENTATION HANDOUT
