Child Communicative Proficiency and Complex Syntactic Usages: Socioeconomic Differences and Task Constraints

SILVA, MARÍA LUISA

International Journal of Language and Literature

American Research Institute for Policy Development

Año: 2016 vol. 4 p. 1 - 12

2334-234X

The purpose of this study was to analyze the speech of 5-year-old children in the context of child-adult interaction by exploring the relationship between indices of psycholinguistic performance - based on syntactic maturity - and the frequency of use of relative clauses (RCs). It takes into consideration the participant´s socioeconomic status (middle and low) as well as the constraints of the communicative tasks (semi-structured interviews (SSI) and elicitation telling tasks (ETT).Based on the assumption that the linguistic ability of 5-year-old children is characterized by the use of complex linguistic structures, it is crucial to specify and describe what complex structures are used by children in each different linguistic task. Using statistical analyses, this paper describes the subject´s usage of complex syntactic structures, while at the same time, raising questions about the usefulness of the proposed performance indicators. This analysis showed that the use of syntactic structures by children belonging to low socioeconomic groups should not be described in terms of deficit, but in terms of availability and use of different syntactic strategies, thus providing evidence against the hypothesis of syntactic deficit in children belonging to disadvantaged social groups. The data showed that the use of RC seems to be related to the quantity of words used, and also to the type of interactions (that might require the use of reference specifications).Keywords: Language development; Syntactic development; relative clauses, child language, conversational interactions