Syntactic complexity and information transmission in first-graders: A cross-cultural study

Some differences between child and adult communication are due to general developmental immaturity and some to language-specific factors. The Piagetan concept of syncretism exemplifies an hypothecated universal of psycholinguistic development, and it results in child texts characterized by minimally structured temporal, causal, and logical connections. A different sort of problem is that, within a specific language, certain syntactic items may fail to mature in children at the expected rate, because of structural oddities of the constructions. English has several such constructions, generally peculiar in their conflict between surface- and deep-structure subject of the main verb. It is predictable that a syncretistic child attempting to deal with such items in a text will analyze them according to the surface-structure analogic method which defines verbal syncretism, and so will fail to make sense of them. Finally, cutting across these child language features are others peculiar to the language of specific groups of children, such as the putative communication impairment of the disadvantaged black child, whose language has been described by some researchers as less efficient and slower to mature than that of others. Clearly, if this is so, then black children's language should at any young age show more evidence of syncretistic communicative immaturity as well as slower development of adult syntactic patterns. The present paper, then, investigates on a cross-cultural basis the dual hypotheses of syncretism and faulty mastery of difficult syntax, by means of an experimental story-repeating format first used by Piaget. Hypotheses are examined for the cause of children's distinctive communication technique, and the whole question of the significance of black/white differences in communicative style and verbal maturity is discussed.