Does Children’s Comprehension of the Passive Voice Depend on Working Memory?

A key question in child language acquisition is how much it relies on language specific processes, versus working memory (WM) and attentional processes that are shared across verbal and nonverbal domains. Here we investigate the role of WM in the comprehension of declarative, passive sentences involving actional verbs by children 4-5 years old. Children viewed animations depicting an agent and patient interacting while concurrently hearing a passive-sentence description of the action, and judged whether the sentence matched the animation. Half of the depictions were logically reversible when subject and object switched thematic roles. WM load was manipulated by imposing the concurrent maintenance of verbal lists or visuospatial arrays during sentence comprehension. Neither type of WM load reliably affected comprehension of the passive structure compared to no load, with no interaction with sentence reversibility. Comprehension of novel syntactic forms thus seems to rely largely on language-specific processes.