TalkTogether Blog

Contributing author: Athina Ntalli This blog post was written for teachers and parents interested in learning more about how we can encourage children’s production of complex sentence structures. This is not meant to be an exhaustive literature review on the topic, but it attempts to raise awareness on what we can potentially do based on research findings.  Research has shown that children with strong oral (=spoken) language skills at a young age are more prepared for school and literacy. Oral language skills have been shown to predict later academic achievement and even life outcomes [1, 2]. Syntactic complexity is one component of oral language skills, and its development may help children be more ready for the academic language they will encounter in school.  How we as parents, caregivers and teachers interact with children can influence the mastery of complex sentence structures. For instance, one study [3] showed that mothers who use repetition and expand children’s utter...

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 claus...

Contributing author: Athina Ntalli This blog post was written for teachers and parents interested in children’s acquisition of syntax. 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 Language is a unique human characteristic. Despite all of us speaking (or signing in) a language, we still get awed by how children learn a language - miraculously fast and effortlessly. We realise better what an accomplishment this is when we start learning an additional language at any point after childhood and we then normally need to spend a lot of time practising to get better.  In this blog post, we will focus on the development of one aspect of language, that is syntax, and discuss the first steps of syntactic development in children’s first language(s) focusing on production. When we talk about syntax, in simple terms, we refer to the rules of h...