The Effects of Maternal Level of Education on Syntactic Development
Loading...
Files
Date
2013-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Over the years several studies have explored the effect of maternal level of education on lexical development in child language. However, the extent to which this factor influences children's syntactic development is more of an open question. This study examines whether maternal level of education correlates with children's receptive knowledge of tense marking and other grammatical constructions that theoretically depend on tense marking, such as subject pronominal case and subject auxiliary inversion. The sample is made up of 36 children between the ages of 3;4 and 6;6. The parents of the children completed a questionnaire that included questions about demographic information. Also, a standardized language test was administered to quantify the children's language skills. Then, a grammaticality choice task was used to test the children's knowledge of verb finiteness, pronoun case in subject position, subject auxiliary inversion in wh- questions, and binding. The results were then analyzed for significant correlations. The importance of this research is that it may help us to better understand the role of environmental factors in the development of children's syntax.
Description
Keywords
Child language development, Development of grammar, Syntactic development, Maternal level of education