Mandarin Competence Measured by Syntactic Complexity

Syntactic complexity (SC) explores how language materials are put into meaningful utterances and how well such utterances are formed. This chapter mainly illustrates the function of SC among children of the four home language groups, in terms of their number of Mandarin utterances (NMU) produced, the syntactic forms these utterances took, and the syntactic features the prominent syntactic forms enact. Upon analysis, it was found that SC showed differences among the four home-language groups in terms of their NMU, mean-length utterances (MLU) and the syntactic forms and features of single word utterances and multiple-clause utterances (MCU) These differences were found to be statistically significant, and positive correlations were found on NMU, MLU, MCU, subordinate-clause relation (of MCU), and its sub-relation (mainly the causal relation ) with increased Mandarin exposure (represented by the Chinese Exposure Index, CEI) . Together with findings on LD in Chap. 5, these findings collectively support this study’s first hypothesis that Mandarin exposure dictates the competence of children in this study.