พัฒนาการทางวากยสัมพันธ์ของเด็กไทยในการเล่าเรื่อง / นิรัติศัย กระจายเกียรติ = Syntactic development in story telling of Thai children / Nirattisai Krachaikiat
This research comprises a bottom-up analysis of the syntactic development in story telling of Thai children. Thai native speakers from five age groups -3, 5, 9, 11 years and Adults – are compared using a cross-sectional data. The “Frog Story” materials are used to elicit open-ended oral story telling. It is hypothesized that Thai children’s story telling will show the syntactic development in terms of the number, the length, and the complexity of the structure of utterances. These narratives are then segmented into performance units based on objective criteria. The utterance boundaries in this research are Pause Defined Units (PDU), performance units which are appropriate for both of the quantitative and qualitative syntactic development analyses. The result of the quantitative syntactic development analysis in terms of the number of utterances shows an increase in the mean of the number of utterances with age, except for the 11 year-old group. However, the variation of the number of utterances incenses with age. The result of the quantitative syntactic development analysis in terms of the length of the utterances shows a large amount of utterances with 7 and smaller than 7 words in every age group, especially in children's utterances. On the contrary, the number of utterances larger than 7 words is very little in every age group, especially in children's utterances. Utterances larger than 7 words are found more in adults. The result of the qualitative syntactic development analysis in terms of the structure of utterances shows that the 3 and 5 year-old groups use a lot of Conjoined Clauses whereas the 9 and 11 year-old groups and adults use a large number of Simple Sentences. Complex Sentences and Extended Clauses clearly increase by age. Prepositional Phrases increase by age. When Immediate Constituent analysis was used, the complexity of the structure of utterances increases by age. This research concludes that represent that Thai children’s story telling exhibits the syntactic development in terms of the number, the length, and the complexity of the structure of utterances.
