Purpose: Multiple methods have been suggested for quantifying syntactic complexity in speech. We compared eight automated syntactic complexity metrics to determine which best captured verified syntactic differences between old and young adults. Method: We used natural speech samples produced in a picture description task by younger (n = 76, ages…

Using an oral sentence production task, we investigated how preschoolers (N = 28) produce agreement with complex noun phrases and compared their performance to college students (N = 32) to determine whether preschoolers produce agreement patterns that are qualitatively similar to adults'. We also conducted corpus analyses to investigate relevant…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…