An investigation of the relationships between form and comprehension of written materials by eleventh grade students is reported in this paper. Students were asked to manipulate two variables of spacing and punctuation in a consistently administered and marked exercise. Students also completed a comprehension test on the exercise they had just…

Three major hypotheses were tested in this study: (1) there will be a greater frequency of forward and backward eye fixation for that linguistically defined area of a selected exprimental sentence which contains the verb, as compared to either the area of the subject or the area of the object of the verb; (2) there will be differences in the…

Developed by the Oregon Elementary English Project, this curriculum unit introduces fifth and sixth graders to sentence structure. Based on transformational grammar, the unit (1) demonstrates to students their built-in knowledge of English grammar which enables them to produce and recognize sentences although they are not consciously aware of…

The syntactical speech characteristics of black children living in depressed areas of an Eastern city were compared with the eight identified by Baratz, i.e., absence of "s" in the third person singular, zero copula, double negation and "ain't," zero past marker, zero possessive marker, zero plural marker, the substitution of "did" or "can" for…

This article discusses prepositive expressions, expressions whose meaning is equivalent to that of one single preposition, and preposition groups in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Five experiments were performed in which nursery school children were taught to identify persons, animals, or objects in pictures that took the nominative, objective, or locative case in sentences about the pictures. Inferences are made about categories in children's thinking including animate, and actor and agent. (CTM)

Five experiments examined how the duration of a word spoken in a sentence is influenced by the grammatical category to which it belongs, and the position of the word in a constituent. The findings indicated that a binary distinction between major and minor categories is sufficient for a theory of speech timing and synthesis. (Author/JAC)

This article hypothesizes that causative constructions among the languages of the world share some fundamental characteristics, even though they have different ordering restrictions and varying degrees of fusion. (Author/NCR)

All modern Romance languages except Rumanian have a class of causative + infinitive construction in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive. This article investigates the question of how agentivization of the infinitive subject is to be handled in these languages. (DS)

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

A descriptive introduction to the Vietnamese language is presented. An introductory chapter gives an overview of the population using Vietnamese, its affiliation with Chinese and other languages, dialects, role in religion, history, writing systems, syllabic structure, and body language. Chapter 2 describes its sound system, syllable boundaries,…

This study analyzed the grammatical features of two classes of words in Japanese, adjectives and adjectival nouns. Both have functions similar to those of English adjectives, but their behaviors differ syntactically or morphologically from each other. Differences in psychological processes, evident in both lexical retrieval processes and native…

Reviews research using sentence length as a factor in predicting readability and discusses the possibility of sentence complexity as a more accurate variable. (TO)