The influence of children's levels of field-dependence-independence on their performance with the passive transformation was investigated. Eighty 6th graders, classified as field-dependent or field-independent, were presented with sentence-question combinations, each in either the active or passive voice, and numbers of correct responses were…

A summative evaluation of a Program English curriculum which found that the effects of a study of transformational grammar on the language growth of secondary school students was negligible. (DD)

This article clarifies the position taken in the Greenfield and Smith book (1976), including relation to speech act theory, and elucidates some general theoretical issues in early language development. (Author/NCR)

This article reviews and criticizes Fay's particular transformational descriptions as implausible. (Author/NCR)

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children aged 2;0 to 13;11 and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. Full passives were classified as reversible (The dog was chased by the girl), instrumental non-reversible (The lamp was broken by [or with] the ball), or agentive non-reversible (The lamp was broken…

This paper, based on Rosenbaum's (1967) grammar of adult English, attempts to apply ideas of deep structure and transformations to child grammar. The main rules predicated include phrase structure rules, segment structure rules, contextual features, and transformational rules. In this approach, the role of transformations is to segment and place…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE IS CONSIDERED AS A QUESTION OF SPECIFYING HOW CHILDREN'S CAPACITY FOR LANGUAGE INTERACTS WITH THEIR LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE--THE INTERACTION TAKING THE FORM OF RELATING THE UNIVERSAL ASPECTS OF THE DEEP STRUCTURE TO THE IDIOSYNCRATIC ASPECTS OF THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. THIS INTERACTION OCCURS IN THE ACQUISITION…

THE FREQUENCY OF 'ASPECT' (PERFECT AND PROGRESSIVE IN THE AUXILIARY) WAS REPORTED FOR RETARDED, NORMAL, AND SUPERIOR CHILDREN ACROSS AGE AND THE ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE MODALITIES. DATA WERE LIMITED IN SEVERAL RESPECTS, PARTICULARLY SIZE OF SAMPLE. THIS IS A PILOT STUDY RATHER THAN A SERIOUS EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE…

This review of literature in linguistics and the psychology of language focuses on studies produced from 1961 through 1963. Such topics as language development, generative grammar, semantics, and the role of linguistics in the teaching of reading are covered, and much attention is given to the areas of verbal learning and the psychology of…

The objectives of the research reported here were (1) to develop and test the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) technique, a method for quantifying the increasing use of syntactic and morphological structures in the spontaneous speech of children between the ages of three and seven, (2) to establish age norms for syntactic and morphological…

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. This paper represents the beginning of a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrates on comparing the syntax used by ten…

This unannotated bibliography consists of 160 citations of books and journal articles dealing with linguistics (traditional grammar, semantics, syntax, morphology, inflectional rules, transformational grammar, generative phonology), language usage, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, verbal behavior, psychology, and the philosophy of…

This is an annotated bibliography intended to provide, for teachers of English, enough information about research and experimentation in sentence-combining to enable them to begin to use it as a pedagogical technique with some understanding of the theories and issues involved. The annotations are selective in that they summarize the information…

A study designed to investigate to what extent ethno-linguistic background affects speech patterns and syntactic flexibility of grades one, four and six children from monolingual, bilingual-French and bilingual-German rural communities. A total of 216 randomly selected subjects were used; they were selected from nine rural Manitoba schools, and…