Passives of subject-experiencer verbs: Functional brain localization in adults reflects developmental stages in children

This work is an fMRI study with adults, but it starts from a well-established finding in children. Until the age of 5-6 years, children have great difficulty understanding sentences like “The teacher is loved by the students,” where a verb from the subject-experiencer (SE) class is used in the passive voice. We propose that SE verbs lack a VP-external argument, and therefore ought to be ineligible for passivization. Older children and adults nonetheless manage to passivize them, we propose, by first performing a step of ‘semantic coercion’: converting the VP-internal ‘experiencer’ (of a mental state) into a VP-external ‘possessor’ (of that same mental state). This becomes possible, we propose, at a point in neurodevelopment (age 5-6) when children have already mastered the core grammar of their native language.

An important prediction is that comprehension of SE passives in adults will result in localized brain activity in at least one region that is (a) outside the canonical language areas (as identified by a language localizer task), and (b) subject to ongoing maturational changes in 5- to 6-year-olds. Indeed, our fMRI study on 32 adult English speakers found that comprehension of SE passives (when contrasted with comprehension of either SE actives or agent-patient passives) is associated with significantly increased activity in an area of left ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) that is both outside canonical language areas and still maturing in 5- to 6-year-olds. This brain region has been linked in prior studies to both semantic coercion and theory of mind.

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