Syntactic maturity and organization of speech: a study on teenagers’ grammatical competence in narrative and argumentative productions

Abstract

This article exposes the results of a piece of research carried through in the city of Cordoba, Argentina. Taking the psycholinguistic theoretical framework as reference, this research work aims at analyzing, in teenagers’ written productions, the syntactic maturity or the ability to produce complex sentences from the structural point of view. The specific goals of this research work were: to asses the indexes of syntactic maturity of teenagers immersed in the educational system of the city of Cordoba, and to establish the possible relations of these assessments with the discourse organization and gender variables. From the methodological point of view, this task was performed within the framework of a quantitative research design; the corpus conformed by the narrations and argumentations produced by the participating teenagers was approached from the same framework. Regarding the results, this research allowed to prove that, in the universe under consideration, it would not be possible to point out significant relations, in terms of differences, between the gender variable and the syntactic ability.On the contrary, regarding the variable discourse organization, the links to syntactic maturity were much more evident.