Clause relationships in spoken and written English

There are opposing views on whether speech or writing is more complex syntactically. We investigated the complexity of clause relationships in a range of spoken and written text categories: spontaneous conversations, broadcast discussions, unscripted monologues, personal handwritten letters, academic writing, and non-academic writing. Conversations proved to be the most distinctive category. It had the highest percentage of simple clauses and the lowest percentage of both subordination and coordination. For all the other categories there is not a sharp distinction between speech and writing in any of the measures that were applied.