Does literacy improve sentential length and syntactic complexity?

Abstract

In this article I define and implement four objective measurements, one corresponding to what I call “sentential length” and three more corresponding to what I call “syntactic complexity.” The sentential length measurement is essentially the number of phrases per sentence, while the syntactic complexity measurements assign a numeric value to sentences on the basis of the type of syntactic constituents and errors present in the sentences. These measurements are applied to a sample of recorded spontaneous speech of two groups, one of literate and one of illiterate speakers of Caracas Spanish. The purpose of the study is, on the one hand, to define these measurements, and, on the other, to use them to compare the two groups. The results show that the mean values for all the measures are higher for literate informants.

The results suggest that literacy may be an important modifier of the linguistic behavior of speakers and that it is particularly associated with higher values for the four measurements I propose, summarized under the terms “sentential length” and “syntactic complexity.”

The article is organized the following way: In the introduction I explain the relevance of (il)literacy for linguistic and in particular sociolinguistic studies. In the following section I describe the measurements I developed and the analysis I performed. In the third section I interpret the results and in the last section I give my conclusion.