School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Redeveloping the IPSyn metric to code the grammatical complexity of children's written language

Samuel, Priscilla ( 2009)

The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) was developed as a measure of grammatical complexity in children. However, IPSyn and other measures of children's grammatical complexity such as MLU, are not designed for the use with the language of children over the age of five. Therefore, these measures are only designed to be used with spoken language and not written data. There is no suitable metric currently available to analyse the grammatical complexity of primary school aged children's written language when using corpus data. This study applies the IPSyn to a corpus of narratives written by 145 primary school aged children (prep to grade six), analyses the insufficiencies of IPSyn when coding this data, and proposes a revised model that is more suited to children's written language. The revised model is used to recode a subset of the original corpus, and results are compared with the original IPSyn scores, as well as set of subjective scores assigned by primary school teachers regarding the grammatical complexity of the stories.