Purpose: Linguistic proficiency can be defined as a multi-layered and dynamic process shaped by an individual's age, life experiences, and social environment. This proficiency encompasses not only vocabulary knowledge or basic grammatical skills but also includes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic competencies. Syntactic complexity serves as a key indicator of this proficiency, reflecting how effectively and diversely individuals utilize various structural elements in their linguistic productions. In this context, the use of non-finite verb forms (i.e., verbals) is particularly prominent as a critical metric in assessing language development. Narrative samples are frequently employed in language assessments because they reflect an individual's language use in natural contexts and provide more functional outputs compared to formal evaluation tools.
Method: In this study, narratives produced by Turkish-speaking healthy young adults aged 18–30, with no known neurological or linguistic impairments, were analyzed through different narrative materials. Participants were asked to produce narratives based on three single-picture descriptions (Picnic, Cookie Theft, Accident) and one structured story-retelling task based on the book Frog, Where Are You? The collected data were transcribed and analyzed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts – Turkish Version (SALT-TK). The microlinguistic variables examined included total number of utterances, usage of conjunctions and postpositions, production of verbals, sentence types, mean length of utterance (MLU), and type-token ratio (TTR).
Results: The findings revealed that the Frog, Where Are You? retelling task yielded significantly richer and more syntactically complex microlinguistic outputs compared to the other narrative types (p<0.01). Additionally, correlation analyses showed statistically significant relationships between the production of verbals and the frequency of conjunctions, postpositions, and various sentence types (p <0.05). Accordingly, narrative-based language assessment methods not only measure an individual's current linguistic abilities but also offer a functional framework for identifying potential areas for development. Given that different narrative types impose varying cognitive demands on individuals, the type of material used can directly influence levels of syntactic complexity. This highlights the close relationship between language production and both cognitive and contextual components.
Conclusion: Structured narrative tasks, in particular, are thought to activate higher-order cognitive processes such as establishing causal links between events, maintaining temporal sequencing, and developing character perspectives. Therefore, story-retelling tasks that rely on structured narratives can provide comprehensive insight not only into linguistic competencies but also into narrative coherence and cognitive organization. In conclusion, the use of verbals and other microlinguistic elements in the narratives of Turkish-speaking young adults serve as important indicators of linguistic maturity and development. Assessing these structures allows for a deeper understanding of age-related language development processes. Future research should aim to expand the sample size and incorporate both microsrtuctural and macrostructural language elements to build a more robust normative data pool.
Keywords
narrative, young adult, microlinguistic analysis, syntactic complexity
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