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Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Vol.41 433-444 April 1998.
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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Average C-Unit Lengths in the Discourse of African American Children From Low-Income, Urban Homes

Holly K. Craig 1
Julie A. Washington 1

Connie Thompson-Porter 1
1 University of Michigan Ann Arbor

hkc{at}umich.edu

This investigation reports average length of communication units (C-nits) in words and in morphemes for 95 4- to 6 1/2-year-old African American boys and girls from lower-income homes in metropolitan Detroit. Mean C-units increased across the age span of this sample, and kindergartners produced significantly longer C-units than preschoolers. The syntactic complexity of the children's language samples correlated positively with increases in C-unit length, and regression analyses revealed that syntactic complexity was the best predictor of mean C-unit length. Children with longer average C-unit lengths produced greater frequencies of all types of syntactic complexity. Their language samples were distinguished from children with shorter mean C-unit lengths by clauses linked with coordinate and subordinate conjunctions. The findings indicate that average C-unit length will be useful as a quantitative index of linguistic growth in research designs focusing on young school-age African American children living in poverty.

KEY WORDS: African Americans, children, low income, sentence lengths, language development

Submitted on December 9, 1996
Accepted on August 28, 1997


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