This new paper (co-authored with Elliot Holmes) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Child Language. It is based on research carried out initially with Lydia Gunning and Ekaterini Klepousniotou, as part of the pilot project Assessing core language skills in pre-adolescents in the Born-in-Bradford cohort.
Abstract:
Little is known of syntactic development during early adolescence. Is complex syntax truly mastered at the beginning of secondary education? Are there differences between the knowledge of complex structures and the ability to use them?
Building on a critical review of the literature on syntactic complexity, we investigate these questions in a sentence repetition task and a narrative task, performed by 126 monolingual and bilingual 11- to-13-year-olds educated monolingually and growing up in areas affected by socioeconomic deprivation in the UK.
We demonstrate substantial individual variation associated with syntactic complexity in both tasks, and propose a novel index of syntactic complexity: the proportion of full subordinate clauses. Combining predictive regression models and random forest analyses, we identify the most important predictors of performance.
Drawing on these exploratory findings, we propose a research program to investigate difficulties associated with complex syntax in this age group.
De Cat, C. and Holmes, E. (in press) Syntactic complexity in adolescents' elicited and semi-spontaneous speech. Journal of Child Language.