This study assesses the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese. Here I present data from three experimental studies designed to test the comprehension of verbal passives by children and to assess contemporary accounts of passive acquisition, namely the Universal Phase Requirement (Wexler, 2004) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (Snyder & Hyams, 2015). The results from Experiment 1 replicate the verb type contrast seen in previous studies for English (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985), Catalan (Cunill, 2012; Gavarró & Parramon, 2017; Gonzaléz, 2018) and Spanish (Oliva & Wexler, 2018), among others. That is, children performed better on passives of actional verbs than on passives of subject experiencer verbs. Children also showed variation between main verbs within the class of subject experiencer verbs, but not within the class of actional verbs. Experiment 2 tested children on their comprehension of actional passives with and without a target-state, in order to assess the assertion that the verb type contrast found in English and Romance languages such as Catalan and Spanish relates to the lack of a result state in the case of subject experiencer verbs. This experiment did not find evidence for this claim. That is, the familiar verb type contrast that was replicated in Experiment 1 cannot be attributed to the lack of a result state. Children showed variation between main verbs only within the class of actional verbs without a target-state: one of these verbs patterned with actional verbs with a target-state, while the other showed some delay. It is argued that the property of affectedness of the internal argument may account for the discrepancies between main predicates seen in Experiments 1 and 2. Finally, the results from Experiment 3 are compatible with the use of an adjectival strategy by young children to comprehend verbal passives (Borer & Wexler, 1987; Gavarró & Parramon, 2017; Hirsch & Wexler, 2006b; Oliva & Wexler, 2018; Wexler, 2004), in particular the fact that children between the ages of 3 and 5 did not appear to distinguish between adjectival and verbal passives.
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