<div dir="ltr">Dear Kim,<div>once you have found a good measure, do you have in mind what you are going to measure it against? Does anyone know whether such measures have been applied to the speech of the adults in some of the child corpora, for example? I know some people will be of the view that the child directed speech is simpler than normal adult speech, but it would provide some degree of measure and looking at some of my own data the adults speaking to three and four year olds are using pretty sophisticated syntax. Sophisticated though it may be, it doesn't however, always include alot of embedding so I don't know how representative simply counting dependent clauses would be. </div><div>I'd be happy to hear what measures you fix on once you've experimented a bit.</div><div>Bernadette Plunkett</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 13 June 2015 at 09:44, RSteinkrauss <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:r.steinkrauss@web.de" target="_blank">r.steinkrauss@web.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><pre>Dear Kim,
in our spoken data of elderly L1 attriters and L2 learners, we
hand-coded a specific syntactic complexity tier for information such as
clause type, number of finite and non-finite verbs, and noun phrase
length tier to measure syntactic complexity because the measures we were
interested in were not directly supported by CLAN. We based our choice
of measures on Bulté and Housen's and Norris and Ortega's work; you
might want to look into their findings.
Regarding your data, a relatively simple way to get at two widely-used
syntactic complexity data would be to proceed the way described in the
material you cited and additionally introduce a tier where you code for
every clause whether it is a independent or dependent clause. Using CLAN
to calculate the number of dependent and independent clauses in each
transcript as well as the total number of words in each transcript would
then allow you to calculate the average length of a T-unit in words
(total words/number of indep. clauses) and a kind of subordination ratio
(dependent/independent clauses).
However, I don't know if these measures are appropriate for relating
them to the risk of AD. Also, since you are dealing with spoken data,
I'd recommend looking into AS- instead of T-units as your unit of
analysis (see Foster's work).
Regards,
Rasmus Steinkrauss<br></pre><div><div class="h5"><br><br>Am Freitag, 12. Juni 2015 16:13:21 UTC+2 schrieb Kimberly Mueller:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Dear All,<br><br>Kimberly Mueller here from UW Madison, using CHAT/CLAN (thank you!!!) to transcribe 5-10 minute language samples from adults ages 40 - 80 who are at risk for developing Alzheimer's Disease.<br><br>Would anyone (and/or everyone!) please provide guidance on measures you recommend to capture syntactic complexity? We have been segmenting utterances using the guidance in the CHAT manual (see below). Any help with codes/commands would also be appreciated!<br><br>Many thanks,<br>Kim<br><br><br><p>Utterance Manual for CHAT/CLAN </p><p><font size="1"><i>Utterances in CHAT/CLAN are separated using a T-unit classification. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>A T-unit consists of an independent clause and its corresponding depending clauses. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>An independent clause includes a subject and a verb. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>A dependent clause provides additional information to an independent clause, but it cannot stand by itself. </i></font></p><p> </p><p><font size="1"><i>For
example, if you were transcribing “I went to the store, but I didn’t
find anything to buy,” you would separate this into two utterances in
CHAT/CLAN. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>*PAR: I went to the store. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>*PAR: but I didn’t find anything to buy. </i></font></p><p> </p><p><font size="1"><i>Even
though these two parts go together in a sentence, they would be
separated into two utterances per the T-unit classification. </i></font></p><p> </p><p><font size="1"><i>An example of a dependent and independent clause would be as follows: </i></font></p><p> </p><p><font size="1"><i>*PAR: If I show up late the teacher will give me a tardy. </i></font></p><p> </p><p><font size="1"><i>In CHAT/CLAN, you also need to make a few judgement calls. </i></font></p><p><font size="1"><i>For
example, in speech, we often start sentences with “because.” “Because”
is typically at the beginning of a dependent clause in written
communication; however, we use this to start sentences when speaking and
thus a transcriber needs to decide whether the “because” is actually
starting the sentence in a spoken utterance. </i></font></p><br></div></blockquote></div></div></div><div><div class="h5">
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