English children are observed to be delayed in their understanding of the passive. While some approaches suggest this is due to either a general grammatical deficiency or verb frequency in children's input, several studies have noted that performance depends on the verb's lexical semantics. We conducted both a meta-analysis of experimental studies assessing the age of acquisition for the passive use of English verbs and a corpus analysis of English children's input. We find a striking correlation between the lexical semantic profile of verbs and the demonstrated age of acquisition for their passive usage by English children, with no relationship to individual verb frequency.