Concreteness Effects and Syntactic Modification in Written Composition

The effect of language concreteness on comprehending and recalling text has been well established, but the ways in which concreteness is incorporated in naturally occurring texts has not been studied. This study investigated whether concreteness was related to a key characteristic of written composition-the cumulative sentence with a final modifier-which has been consistently associated with higher quality writing. Forty-six 9th graders wrote informative compositions that were assessed for holistic quality, the proportion of T-units with final modifiers, and the concreteness values of the T-units' kernel elements (subject, verb, object, complement). Use of the final-modifier construction was significantly related to writing quality, and T-units with final modifiers had more concrete verbs but less concrete objects or complements. These findings are interpreted as support for the conceptual-peg hypothesis of dual coding theory, with concrete verbs providing the pegs on which cumulative sentences are composed.