“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children develop reading comprehension.
A new study 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 study, which appeared in the Royal Society’s 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 (“the boy kicked the ball” versus “the ball was kicked by the boy,” 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.
“The thing about sentence processing is that it happens moment to moment,” Thothathiri said. “Our brain’s predicting what’s going to come next, on the fly. So as we’re hearing ‘the ball is ...,’ the brain’s already interpreting that, and that’s where the trip-up comes in. That’s normal—even adults do that—but adults have mature brains and executive functions, so they can correct that mistake, whereas younger children sometimes actually interpret it incorrectly.”
In the moment, she found, children with higher executive function skills—like working memory (the capacity to hold and remember information for short-term problem-solving) and planning—were quicker to correct their initial misunderstandings of a passive sentence.
But just improving students’ executive skills didn’t improve their comprehension over time. Rather, comprehension was linked to what Thothathiri called a “virtuous spiral” of exposing them to broader and more diverse language and sentence structure, while also developing children’s memory and other executive skills.
“Teachers need to recognize the frequency of exposure to different sentence structures matters,” Thothathiri said. “We don’t 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—the more that it’s exposed to something, the less difficulty people have with that thing.”
