The Development of Syntactic Skills in Children Aged 4 to 10 years

Abstract

The development of syntactic skills in children has not yet been fully described in Polish literature on the subject. The purpose of research, selected results of which are presented in this article, is to at least partly fill in this information. The results are based on samples of utterances collected in a group of 156 children of typical development. In the gathered linguistic material, the words used by the study subjects and the utterances structured with them were noted, the mean length of utterance (MLU) was calculated, the frequency of verbal and non-verbal utterances was indicated, determining the average number of verbal utterances constructed by the study subjects; also the degree of grammatical complexity of the speech of study subjects was indicated, making use of the so-called syntactic saturation indicator. Analysis of the collected data enabled determination of differences between particular age groups and the evolution of their syntactic capabilities.