Persuasive Language in High School Students: Differences in Syntactic Complexity in Spoken and Written Language

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the difference in syntactic complexity in written and spoken persuasive language tasks for adolescents. The students who participated in this study were ninth grade English students (M age = 14; 10), all with typical language development. For each language task, participants were asked to write a persuasive composition and speak about their opinion of high-school students having part-time jobs. The language samples were transcribed using the standard transcriptions of the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software, also known as SALT. To analyze the errors in each sample, I coded for errors at the word level and errors at the utterance level. I found that adolescent students use more complex syntax in written persuasive language samples than in spoken language samples. On average, the participants made more utterance-level errors in the written language samples. I found a significant negative relationship between errors at the word level and scores on writing tests. This means that the higher the student's writing score was, the lower number of word-level errors that student made in the written persuasive task. This finding suggests that SLPs and educators should look to identify grammatical errors in written persuasive language and work to correct them because persuasive language may be an important indicator of academic success and writing abilities.