Complex syntax and withdrawn behavior in children

Abstract

Scope and Method of Study: This study investigated the relation between language impaired (LI) children's production of complex syntactic structures in conversational speech and parental ratings of children's social difficulties, specifically withdrawn behavior's subtype of shyness. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a negative relation between complex syntactic production and parental ratings of social behaviors, such that children with lower complex syntactic abilities would have higher levels of withdrawn behaviors.

Eight school-aged LI children and a parent of each child participated in this study. Parents were administered the Social Responsiveness Scale (Constantino & Gruber, 2005). Children who participated took part in conversational language sample. The language samples were then transcribed and coded complex syntax using the Complex Syntax Coding Manual by Schuele (2009). Following coding, the language samples were analyzed with Systemic Analysis of Language Transcriptions (SALT; Miller, 2010).

Findings and Conclusions: Results indicated that there was no relation between the lack of complex syntax and "shyness" as judged by parents. In fact, the results indicated that there was a trend for LI children with more withdrawn social behaviors to display greater syntactical complexity. For children in this study, the greater the complex syntax exhibited by a child, the less socially motivated that child would be. However, statistical significance was not found. These results were contrary to the original hypothesis posed by the researcher, but were similar to the findings by Hart, Fujiki, Brinton, and Hart (2004).