鈥淎void the passive voice鈥� is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction鈥攁nd other more complex sentences in spoken language鈥攎ay help children develop reading comprehension.
A new on early language finds that preschool and kindergarten-aged children who have been exposed to a wider array of spoken language had better comprehension of the passive voice and other complex sentences, and they were quicker to correct misunderstandings, than peers with smaller receptive language.
The , which appeared in the Royal Society鈥檚 Science journal, was conducted by Malathi Thothathiri, an associate professor of speech and hearing science at George Washington University, and two research partners.
Thothathiri and her colleagues asked 4- and 5-year-olds who had not yet developed fluent reading skills to listen to a series of active and passively constructed sentences (鈥渢he boy kicked the ball鈥� versus 鈥渢he ball was kicked by the boy,鈥� for example), and point to a picture that described the action.
In a separate task, the researchers used eye-tracking technology to measure how quickly students identified which of the two pictures described a spoken sentence.
鈥淭he thing about sentence processing is that it happens moment to moment,鈥� Thothathiri said. 鈥淥ur brain鈥檚 predicting what鈥檚 going to come next, on the fly. So as we鈥檙e hearing 鈥榯he ball is ...,鈥� the brain鈥檚 already interpreting that, and that鈥檚 where the trip-up comes in. That鈥檚 normal鈥攅ven adults do that鈥攂ut adults have mature brains and executive functions, so they can correct that mistake, whereas younger children sometimes actually interpret it incorrectly.鈥�
In the moment, she found, children with higher executive function skills鈥攍ike working memory (the capacity to hold and remember information for short-term problem-solving) and planning鈥攚ere quicker to correct their initial misunderstandings of a passive sentence.
But just improving students鈥� executive skills didn鈥檛 improve their comprehension over time. Rather, comprehension was linked to what Thothathiri called a 鈥渧irtuous spiral鈥� of exposing them to broader and more diverse language and sentence structure, while also developing children鈥檚 memory and other executive skills.
鈥淭eachers need to recognize the frequency of exposure to different sentence structures matters,鈥� Thothathiri said. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 go around speaking in passive voice or in complicated sentences that often, but in books, you often find these more complicated sentence structures. And the brain is a statistical learning machine鈥攖he more that it鈥檚 exposed to something, the less difficulty people have with that thing.鈥�
