Acquiring the passive voice : online production of the English passive construction by Mandarin speakers

The study utilises Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann 1998) and its extension, the Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis (Pienemann, Di Biase, & Kawaguchi 2005) and the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis (Pienemann et al. 2005; Kawaguchi & Di Biase 2005) as the language development framework to investigate the acquisition of the English passive construction by Mandarin learners of English as a second language (ESL): The two hypotheses predict that second language (L2) learners initially map the most prominent argument role (the agent) onto the grammatical subject to produce L2 in the active voice; as the learners’ L2 develops, they then learn to attribute prominence to the semantic patient to produce the passive construction. Six native Mandarin speakers of three different ESL proficiency levels (early intermediate, late intermediate, advanced) participated in a cross-sectional study where informants were shown a computer animation clip, the Fish Film (Tomlin 1995, 1997), which has been demonstrated to successfully elicit the English passive construction from native English speakers. The study found that the lower level learners consistently could not implement the instructional and contextual cues and persisted in using the active construction throughout the entire task; the late intermediate learner in the study was able to employ an alternative strategy which although was constrained by the processing capacity of the learner neverthelss preserved and conveyed the discourse- pragmatic focus of the event. The advanced learners of the study performed comparable to the native speaker control. The results are interpreted as supporting the two PT-based hypotheses, which predict that early learners will cling on to the canonical mapping of Agent-Action- Patient to SVO and that they will not have the necessary processing resources to handle structures which deviate from the canonical semantic role to grammatical function alignment