Madurez sintáctica: influencia de las TIC en sus índices y estudio comparativo entre las generaciones pre y post-internet

There is a growing concern about the poor quality of the writing of children and teenagers because of the continuous and constant exposure to the new technologies. Increasingly parents complain that their children spend too much time with their phones, tablets, computers, video games, etc. There is also an increase in the number of teachers who complain about their students’ writing skills. Some of the most prominent criticisms are loss of vocabulary, simplified syntax and the poor spelling of the compositions. To verify if these criticisms are motivated or not by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is what moved us to initiate this doctoral dissertation entitled “The influence of ICT on ratings of syntactic maturity: a comparative study between pre- and post-internet generations”. We aim to know if a daily and constant exposure to the ICT can affect the syntactic maturity rates of children and teenagers. We also want to find out if there are differences between the levels of syntactic maturity of today’s students and those of the 1990s, when there were no ICT and internet. In order to do this, we have carried out a quantitative analysis taking as a reference previous studies by generativist researchers in the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic world and we have used the same units of measure (T-unit and clause). We collected a corpus of 382 essays, half argumentative and half descriptive, from 191 individuals. We have analyzed them according to ten dependent variables or syntactic maturity rates and other independent variables (Hours in internet, Course, Sex, Location, Type of school) by applying techniques of descriptive and inferential statistics...

Consequences of adolescent's evening preference on psychological functioning: a review

This review provides an overview of the role of circadian preference in psychological functioning of adolescents taking into account their shift to eveningness during this stage of life. After a brief explanation about morningness/eveningness and other terms related, an overview of the changes that occur on three of the most important areas in the adolescent‟s life is presented: school performance, personality styles, and health. Consequences of evening preference on school achievement are considered from the analysis of the relevance of sleep debt and time-of-day in cognition and mood aspects. In general, students who are able to choose activity times coinciding with their preferred times may have a greater opportunity to optimize their performance. The personality styles and health of morning and evening types are also important factors related to school and family adaptation. At last, some recommendations and conclusions in order to promote a healthy psychological functioning are described.