Encouraging Use of Subordination in Children’s Narratives: A Classroom-Based Priming Study

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children’s use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming.

During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking five-year-olds heard 10 stories, one a day, that either contained a high proportion of subordinate clauses (subordination condition) or a high proportion of coordinate clauses (coordination condition). Post-intervention, there was a significant group difference in likelihood of subordinate use which persisted ten weeks after the priming. Neither expressive grammatical nor receptive vocabulary skills were positively correlated with the likelihood of subordinate use.

These findings show that input manipulation can have a facilitative effect on the use of complex syntax over several weeks in a realistic communicative task.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the staff and children at Greswell Primary and Moss Park Infant School for their enthusiastic collaboration. Thanks also to Paul Conroy, Rachael King, and Ruth Wadman for assistance with testing, transcription, and preparation of materials.

Funding

This study was funded by a grant awarded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to the first two authors (RES-000-22-3678).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a grant awarded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to the first two authors (RES-000-22-3678).