Abstract
Summary. An analysis of the written compositions of a national sample of 520 British school children was carried out using two measures: (i) writing productivity as measured by the composition length in words; (ii) the mean minimal terminable unit (T‐unit) length in words, a measure of syntactic maturity. Although this sample exhibited the typical association between family size and reading attainment, there were no family size differences with respect to writing productivity or syntactic maturity. The results were discussed with regard to the possibility of a syntactic differentiation among children from families of larger size such that the syntactic content of standardised reading comprehension tests would prejudice their test performance.
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