Written Language & Literacy - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010

The study analyzed text-embedded lexical usage as diagnostic of writing-speech-distinctions in stories and discussions produced in the two modalities by English-speaking grade-school children, middle-school pre-adolescents, high-school adolescents, and adults. We assumed that (1) while children master writing as a notational system by age 9 to 10 years, command of written language as a special style of discourse has a long developmental trajectory, and (2) distinct processing constraints and communicative circumstances combine to affect texts produced in the two modalities. Across the board, written texts scored higher than their spoken counterparts produced by the same participants on all five measures that we applied — Word Length, Register, Density, Diversity, and Abstractness — reflecting a more elevated and carefully monitored style of expression. With regard to development, high school students emerged as distinct from the two younger groups, demonstrating adolescence as a developmental watershed in discourse-embedded lexical usage as in other domains of text construction. When task order (written texts produced before or after spoken ones, respectively) is taken into account, however, a more complex, multi-faceted picture emerges with respect to the variables of age, specific lexical measure, and order effects.

The lexicon, a complex storage device of units of language use, is a central component of linguistic knowledge closely tied to grammar and has a strong influence on demanding cognitive tasks and academic achievement. This study aims at tracking the growth of the Catalan written lexicon of children and adolescents throughout compulsory schooling, a time when the lexicon is assumed to experience an exponential growth. 2,436 participants from 5 to 16 years attending compulsory school in Catalonia took part in the study. They were asked to write as many linguistic expressions as possible in five different semantic fields: Food, Clothing, Leisure activities, Personality traits, and Natural phenomena. Although both the task and the provided examples primed the production of single words, participants produced a variety of constructions. The 242,404 lexical forms that were produced were lemmatized into 8,498 different lemmas and coded according to different linguistic dimensions. The size and the conceptual underpinning of the lexicon grow significantly throughout compulsory school and show an increase in the use of correct Catalan forms, a reduction in deviant forms, and a steady use of words and constructions in other languages. The use of multiword constructions as a mechanism for word generation questions the separability between lexicon and syntax. The corpus, which is of public access (http://clic.ub.edu/es/cesca), provides a picture of the state of a language developing in a multilingual environment in terms of frequency of use of words and constructions and range of orthographic and linguistic variants in five semantic fields.

In this study, we focus on pronominal anaphora and we investigate the referential properties of null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan, in the semi-spontaneous production of narrative spoken and written texts by three groups of speakers/writers (9–10, 12–13, and 15–16 year olds). We aimed at determining (1) pronoun preferences for a specific type of antecedent; (2) their specialization in a certain discourse function; and (3) whether the pattern is affected by text modality (spoken vs. written texts). We analyzed 30 spoken and 30 written narrative texts, produced by the same 30 subjects, divided into the age groups mentioned above. Results seem fairly consistent across age groups and modalities, showing that null pronouns tend to select antecedents in subject position and are well specialized in maintaining reference, while overt pronouns offer a less clear pattern both in their selection of antecedents and in the discourse function they perform. Our findings partially support those of previous research on other null-subject languages, in particular, the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH) formulated by Carminati (2002) for Italian.

The main purpose of the present paper is to explore children’s abilities to introduce punctuation in Spanish texts. In this context, sixty Mexican elementary school children (ages 8–11) were asked to edit an expository text. The children’s written responses were analyzed from a pragmatic perspective following Nunberg (1990) and Figueras (2001). The result of this exercise led to some hypotheses on the relation between the discursive connectors and punctuation, and also on the semantic criteria that lead children to delimit certain textual units. From the way the children delimited units we observed a tendency to progress from identifying text sentences to defining them with punctuation in expository written discourse. Children differentiated in their use of punctuation, using commas for serial units and upper cases and full stops for text sentences beginning with explicit subjects. Therefore, we follow that explicit subjects might be a key starting point in the development of those criteria that help to differentiate the structures of text sentences and serial units, at least when revising someone else’s text.