Assessing Children's Understanding of Complex Syntax: A Comparison of Two Methods

Abstract

We examined the effect of two methods of assessment—multiple‐choice sentence–picture matching and an animated sentence‐verification task—on typically developing children's understanding of relative clauses. A sample of children between the ages of 3 years 6 months and 4 years 11 months took part in the study (N = 103). Results indicated that (a) participants performed better on the sentence‐verification than on the multiple‐choice task independently of age, (b) each testing method revealed a different hierarchy of constructions, and (c) the impact of testing method on participants’ performance was greater for some constructions than others. Our results suggest that young children can understand complex sentences when they are presented in a manner that better reflects how people process language in natural discourse. These results have implications for the study of language comprehension in suggesting that results from multiple‐choice tasks may not generalize to other methods. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Data badge. All data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/27gwb. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome

“…With respect to children with typical development, we can see that they performed near ceiling on all relative clause types. In a previous study ( Frizelle et al , 2018a ), reporting on typically developing 3- to 5-year-olds, we reported the following hierarchy: intransitive subject > indirect object = transitive subject = object = oblique relatives (where ‘>’ refers to significantly greater than, and ‘=’ refers to no significant differences). However, the children included in the current study are considerably older, ranging in age from 5;01 to 7;09 years and we therefore expect a more stable performance across relative clause types.…”

“…In this analysis we calculated the proportion of children in each group that passed each construction on the sentence verification task (shown in Table 8 ), where a pass was defined as a score of 7 or 8 out of 8 items correct. This allowed us to document the order of difficulty of the different complex sentence types in the three groups and to consider if the relative clauses followed the same rank ordering as was observed in our prior study of TD 3- to 5-year-olds ( Frizelle et al , 2018a ). An analysis of Table 6 shows that within each type of complex sentence (relative, adverbial, complement), all three groups performed best on relative clauses, while children’s performance on adverbial and complement clauses was similar within each group.…”

“…The comparable constructions included in both tests were the intransitive subject relatives (attached to a main clause object). These are deemed to be the earliest bi-clausal relative clause construction to emerge in young children’s expressive language ( Diessel, 2004 ) and the easiest for children to repeat ( Diessel & Tomasello, 2005 ; Frizelle & Fletcher, 2014 ) and to understand ( Frizelle et al , 2018a ). In order to compare the two testing methods fairly, we needed to adopt a stringent scoring of the TECS-E, where a pass is credited for perfect performance (8/8 two-choice items correct); the probability of achieving 8/8 by chance (p = 0.004) is the same as for getting all four four-choice items correct on TROG-2.…”

“…Because this is in effect a two-choice test, it is necessary to give at least eight items per structure to distinguish chance performance from understanding. Using this approach we found that TD children as young as 3;06 years showed understanding of some complex constructions that they had found difficult when tested using the more traditional multiple choice picture-pointing approach (see Frizelle et al ., 2018a ). Of course, no method is completely free of task demands or item-specific influences on performance, but our experience of the TECS-E with young children raised the possibility that traditional approaches to assessing comprehension may underestimate understanding in children with DS.…”

“…Based on previous findings (such as those reported by Abbeduto et al , 2003 ; Chapman, 2006 ; Laws & Bishop, 2004 ) we hypothesised that those with DS would perform similarly to those with an intellectual disability of unknown origin but more poorly than the TD group matched on non-verbal ability. Based on data from TECS-E with TD children aged from 3;06 to 5 years (see Frizelle et al , 2018a ) we anticipated an order of difficulty within each family of constructions (relative, complement and adverbial). Within the five types of relative clause we expected children to have the least difficulty with intransitive subject relatives, with other relative clause types being of a similar level of difficulty.…”