Following a review of the attempts of researchers like Walter Loban, Kellogg Hunt, Roy O'Donnell, Raymond Norris, and William Griffin to measure the syntactic complexity of the language of school-age children, several inferences are made in this study about the assumptions these investigators have made about the nature of language and of the language acquisition process. Chapter one presents a consideration of the nature of an adequate description of language complexity. Chapter two reviews four investigations of the complexity of student language and demonstrates that they fail to meet the necessary criteria developed in chapter one. Chapters three and four trace the effect of studies of language complexity upon the curriculum. Chapter three reviews several arguments which attempt to relate language complexity to language quality, and chapter four reviews a few of these curriculums and argues that rather than enhancing the student's ability to use complex syntactic structures, they merely condition students to value a different language style. The final section proposes several directions for future studies of language complexity and the relationship of language complexity to language environment. (HOD)