Dependent clauses in the texts of seven-year-olds and ten-year-olds : a longitudinal approach

Maja Ivanović; Natalija Panić Cerovski

doi:10.5817/OS2024-1-8

Dependent clauses in the texts of seven-year-olds and ten-year-olds : a longitudinal approach

Vol.34,No.1(2024)

Maja Ivanović Natalija Panić Cerovski

https://doi.org/10.5817/OS2024-1-8

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.80555

PDF (Serbian)

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the differences in the degree of syntactic maturity of the texts produced by the same students at the end of first grade, and at the end of the first compulsory education cycle (fourth grade). We examine the ability of first and fourth grade students to produce and use different types of dependent clauses in their essays. The corpus for this research consists of the texts of 42 first-grade students on a given topic, and the texts of the same students, on the same topic, in repeated data collection after 3 years, so a variance analysis with repeated measurement was performed. The results shed light on how the structure of complex and complex-compound sentences changes quantitatively and qualitatively at early school age. The results show that the production of relative clauses — one of the most reliable and relevant parameters for measuring the degree of syntactic maturity of the text — steadily increases with age, which is a strong indicator of the proper syntactic development.

Keywords:
later language development; ability for written production; dependent clauses; seven-year-olds; ten-year-olds; Serbian language

Pages:
89–106

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