Syntactic complexity of spontaneous spoken language of adult Croatian speakers
Ana Matić, Gordana Hržica, Jelena Kuvač Kraljević, Marina Olujić · 2018
The aim of this study was to explore syntactic complexity in the spontaneous language of139 adult speakers of Croatian, as well as examine the interrelation between two syntactic complexity measures: length of the production unit, here measured as the mean length of C-units ; and syntactic sophistication, here measured as the proportion of C-units that were relative clauses. The analysis included syntactic structures from the Croatian Adult Spoken Language Corpus(Kuvac Kraljevic and Hržica2016). Our results indicate a significant positive correlation between these two measures, confirmingthat speakers who produce longer utterances also produce less frequent and more complex syntactic structures.