Evaluates the merits of item transformations and the cloze procedure in terms of (1) the extent to which literal comprehension skills are validly measured; (2) the extent to which the issue of passage dependency is addressed; and (3) utility for educational practitioners. (HOD)

A discussion of passives in the context of generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) looks at two problems associated with a lexical rule that derives passive participles from active verbs. The first occurs with sentences whose main verb takes an NP and does not have a passive counterpart. This situation requires a more restrictive metarule, and…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…