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Index of Productive Syntax

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Hollis S. Scarborough
Hollis S. Scarborough*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College of CUNY
*
Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College of CUNY, Brooklyn, NY 11210
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Abstract

A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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