Dimensions of Individual Difference in the Spoken Syntax of School Children

Abstract

Language produced by 180 children (aged five through 13 years) on a story-telling task was analyzed in terms of 57 variables (part-of-speech frequencies and proportions, syntactic elaboration indexes, and constructional variety measures). A factor analysis revealed five dimensions of syntactic usage: general fluency, embeddedness, finite verb structure, noun phrase structure, and qualified speech. The embeddedness dimension was the only one with a sizable relation to age and is interpretable in terms of a developmental progression in the inclusion of transformationally processed content in the sentence. Among the other stylistic dimensions, fluency, and verbal vs nominal emphases in language appear to be in evidence at various age levels and on different types of variables.