Bilingual Adolescents' Complex Syntax Production in Both Languages Across Conversational and Expository Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Bilingual development has been shown to be highly dependent on language-specific exposure. This study extended the study of bilingual development to adolescence and to the production of complex syntax in two contexts: conversation and expository discourse. METHOD: = 14) aged 12 to 17 years produced French and English conversational and expository samples. Measures of mean length of T-units and clausal density were used, as well as a measure of detailed subordinate clause diversity developed in this study. RESULTS: Both groups produced more complex syntax in expository discourse compared to conversation and performed very similarly overall. Significant group differences were found in French subordinate clause diversity but not in sentence length or clause density. For EFbil, differences between languages were unexpectedly greater in conversation. Previous language exposure impacted both languages of the EFbil and in both contexts. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to report on the spontaneous syntactic use of bilingual adolescents in both their languages. Subtle but significant differences were found in the syntactic skills of the two groups. Expository and conversational contexts each provided unique information on aspects of complex syntactic development, calling into question the idea that the ability to produce a more complex context guarantees conversational abilities. Finally, for the EFbil, previous language exposure impacted both languages, particularly in conversation. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23713152.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".