The oral language of 31 conservers and 47 nonconservers was examined to assess the relations among ability to conserve, a measure of cognitive development, and use of specific syntactic structures. T-unit analyses were applied to children's individually rendered stories to determine mean numbers of words per T-unit, adjective clauses per T-unit, adverbial clauses per T-unit, dependent-noun clauses per T-unit, and total dependent clauses per T-unit. There were large ranges in use of all five syntactic structures among subjects within the same cognitive group, conserver or nonconserver. One-tailed t tests indicated a significant difference between conservers and nonconservers only in mean number of words per T-unit, not for the other four syntactic structures.
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