Your English teachers told you to avoid passive voice, and now your computer grammar checkers also warn you to avoid passive voice. But sometimes when you revise a passive voice sentence that flows smoothly into an active voice sentence, you realize that your new sentence flows less smoothly. Do you ever wonder whether the reader is really going to understand the sentence better or remember mor...

Introduction: Sentence production impairments in aphasia often improve with treatment. However, little is known about how cognitive processes supporting sentence production, such as sentence planning, are impacted by treatment. Methods: The present study used eyetracking to examine changes in sentence production resulting from a 12-week language treatment program focused on passive sentences (T...

New variations on the application of the passive-aggressive algorithm to statistical machine translation are developed and compared to previously existing approaches. In online adaptation, the system needs to adapt to real-world changing scenarios, where training and tuning only take place when the system is set-up for the first time. Post-edit information, as described by a given quality measu...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence struct...

A connectionist-inspired, parallel processing network is presented which learns, on the basis of (relevantly) sparse input, to assign meaning interpretations to novel test sentences in both active and passive voice. Training and test sentences are generated from a simple recursive grammar, but once trained, the network successfully processes thousands of sentences containing deeply embedded cla...

Studies measuring inhibitory control in the visual modality have shown a bilingual advantage in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental research on inhibitory control in the auditory modality. This study compared the comprehension of active and passive English sentences in 7-10 years old bilingual and monolingual children. The task was to identify the agent of a sent...

Second, the passive construction (‘has been discussed’) not only forces the use of the auxiliary verb ‘to be’, but also reduces energy by removing the agent of the action from the sentence. As Richard Lanham pointed out, you can’t tell ‘who’s kicking who?’ (sic) in a sentence in the passive voice [1]. Accordingly, in the example above you can’t tell who is doing the ‘discussing’. Traditionally,...

This study used repetition priming to examine the influence of lexical processing on sentence comprehension processing. In order to do that the effect of the lexical priming of nouns and verbs on active compared to passive sentences was investigated. The results revealed that facilitating lexical access resulted in the facilitation of sentence comprehension processes. More specifically it was f...

We conducted a norming study amongst Dutch children (6-12 years) to investigate whether they would correctly interpret our set of 208 color drawings, developed for longitudinal research on the production and comprehension transitive sentences, if action each drawing was described with an active or passive sentence. The provided 93.02% correct answers pictures, which indicates that pictures are ...