The production of complex sentences by children

Contributing author: Athina Ntalli

This blog post was written for teachers and parents interested in children’s acquisition of complex syntax or complex sentence structures. The author considered multiple approaches to language acquisition research and tried to give an as comprehensive representation of the findings as is possible in a short blog post. 

Introduction

In this blog post, we will discuss children’s production of complex utterances. When we refer to syntactic complexity, we usually refer to the production of at least two events in the same utterance, or put differently, the combination of two or more clauses (clause: when there is a verb) together in one sentence, as in the example ‘When I read this article, I should know more about syntactic complexity.’ Here we have two clauses: an independent clause, such as ‘I should know more about syntactic complexity.’ which has full meaning and can stand on its own, and ‘When I read this article’ which is a dependent clause because by itself it does not have complete meaning and cannot stand independently. To make sense of the dependent clause, we need to consider it in conjunction with the independent clause. 

Events can be combined in a sentence through coordination, that is when two clauses are connected with a word such as ‘and’ or ‘or’ (e.g., ‘Mommy wants to sleep and I want to play’.), or through subordination. There are three types of subordinate clauses: 1. complement clauses which are clauses that complement the verb (e.g., ‘I thought that it would be good.’), 2. relative clauses that are clauses introduced with words such as that, who, which (e.g., ‘I like this website that I recently found.’), and 3. adverbial clauses which are clauses introduced with words such as when, while, because, although, if (e.g., ‘I had to leave because I needed to go to the doctor.’).

The production of complex sentences by monolingual children 

Children start producing complex syntax between the ages of 2-3: a few months after they start combining words. In daily conversations, also called a naturalistic language production, monolingual English-speaking children produce very few complex sentences before the age of 4. In fact, 2- to 4-year-olds have been shown to produce complex sentences in less than 10% of all sentences they use [1, 2]. Also, for English, sentential complement clauses are used first (e.g., ‘Mommy wants to sleep.’),  coordinating clauses appear later (e.g., ‘Mommy wants to sleep and I want to play.’), followed by adverbial clauses (e.g., ‘When mommy sleeps, I will play computer games.’), and finally relative clauses (e.g., ‘She likes the backpack which I got for her birthday.’) [1, 2]. 

Syntactic complexity increases with age as children use progressively multiclausal sentences [3]. Complex sentences include either clauses which are structurally equivalent (e.g., ‘Mary went to see her grandma and Bill went to meet his friends.’), or in other cases one of the clauses may depend on the other to have full meaning as we discussed above (e.g., ‘While it was raining, I was outside.’). Some subordinators - important language elements we use to combine sentences- emerge early (e.g., because, when) while others may be used at a later age (e.g., although, until).  

We considered mainly English as an example to provide a comprehensive picture of production of syntactic complexity and how this develops, as it is the language that has been researched most. What this picture shows is that some complex sentence structures do emerge early, but mastery of the various types takes time. 

The production of syntactic complexity by bilingual/multilingual children

Bilingual children’s grammars can be as complex as grammars of monolingual children. In a recent study, children simultaneously bilingual in French and English did not differ from age-matched English monolingual peers in terms of syntactic complexity in spontaneous productions while bilingual children outperformed monolinguals in a structured task assessing their syntactic complexity [4]. Another study looking at syntactic complexity in monolingual and bilingual children coming from a variety of first language backgrounds and with English as an additional language found no difference between 5-to-6-year-old children and one year later when they were between 7-to-8-year-old [5]. Considering children who start learning an additional language at an older age, we have evidence that within a short timeframe they produce complex sentences and in fact a wide variety of them [6]. Although this is not an exhaustive literature review, the three examples showcase the lines of research that show us that bilingual/multilingual children can produce equally complex clauses in a target language as monolinguals do. We should note though that the factors affecting bilingual children’s production of complex clauses may also differ, to which we now turn. 

Factors affecting the production of complex sentences 

Unlike simple syntax, complex sentences can take years to master. This is especially true if we consider many dependent/embedded clauses within a sentence as in the example: ‘When I saw my friend feeling so distressed about his son’s grades, I thought of asking him to go out for a walk with me.’. The production of complex sentences has been argued to be dependent on various factors such as their general cognitive skills (e.g., memory), vocabulary size (that is, how many words a child knows), and the language environment the child is exposed to (e.g., the extent of storybook reading in the child’s home and school). 

Considering children’s exposure to multiclausal utterances and how this might affect their production, there seems to be sufficient evidence to show that listening frequently to syntactically complex language does impact children’s own production of complex clauses. One study showed that individual differences in the development of complex clauses across children could be explained by the nature of the input received from their caregivers [7]. The same authors also found that in classes where teachers’ speech was syntactically more complex, children had greater syntactic growth within a year of preschool. Input then is important for the timing when certain structures will be mastered. 

Finally, another factor that may affect the production of complex sentences and their diversity is literacy, or the skill to read and write and specifically, biliteracy (i.e. the ability to read in two languages) if we are talking about bilingual children [8, 9]. Literacy is important because a child who can read encounters more instances of complex sentences in books than they would encounter in regular, day-to-day conversations. Put differently, more book reading can boost the learning of complex grammar.

To conclude, several factors have been proposed to explain the production of multiclausal utterances by children including cognitive skills, the child’s own vocabulary level, the nature of their language environment and exposure to book language when children learn to read. 

About the Author

Athina Ntalli is a post-doctoral researcher working at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, for the TalkTogether project. She completed her PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include child language acquisition and the factors that shape it.

References

[1] Diessel, H. (2004). The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486531 

[2] Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H., & Huttenlocher, J. (2008). Emergence of syntax: commonalities and differences across children. Developmental science, 11(1), 84–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00656.x

[3] Frizelle, P., Thompson, P., McDonald, D., & Bishop, D. (2018). Growth in syntactic complexity between four years and adulthood: Evidence from a narrative task. Journal of Child Language, 45(5), 1174-1197. doi:10.1017/S0305000918000144 

[4] Korade, C., Nicoladis, E., & Charest, M. (2022). Monolingual and bilingual children’s production of complex syntactic structures. Journal of Child Language, 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000411

[5] Witkowska, D., Lucas, L., Jelen, M. B., Kin, H., & Norbury, C. (2022, January 19). Development of complex syntax in the narratives of children with English as an Additional Language and their monolingual peers. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/96dx5  

[6] Paradis, J., Rusk, B., Duncan, T. S., & Govindarajan, K. (2017). Children's Second Language Acquisition of English Complex Syntax: The Role of Age, Input, and Cognitive Factors. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 148–167. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190517000022 

[7] Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Cymerman, E., & Levine, S. (2002). Language input and child syntax. Cognitive Psychology, 45(3), 337-374. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0285(02)00500-5

[8] Andreou, M. & Tsimpli, I.M. (2020). Bilingualism, biliteracy and syntactic complexity: the role of crosslinguistic influence and cognitive skills. Chapter 6. In A. Cardinaletti, C. Branchini, G. Giusti, F. Volpato (Eds.), Language Acquisition, Processing and Bilingualism, 132-159. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

[9] Montag, J. L. & MacDonald, M.C. (2014). Effects of Text Exposure on Spoken Sentence Production. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 36, 1030- 1035. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fj9s4h3

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