This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…

The orthographic compounds (two or more words written as one word) in M. Rhode and B. Cronnell's lexicon of words used by elementary school children are categorized in this paper, primarily in terms of related semantic/syntactic structures. Following a discussion of orthographic compounds, the paper mentions procedures used by Rhode and Cronnell…

THE WAY IN WHICH WE CONCEIVE OF REALITY IS DEPENDENT UPON THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM WE USE. EACH LANGUAGE SYSTEM, WHETHER THAT OF A WHOLE CULTURE, A SUBCULTURE, OR AN INDIVIDUAL, EMBODIES IN ITS VOCABULARY AND SYNTAX AND RULES OF "GRAMMAR" A SET OF ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY AND THE CORRECT WAYS TO MAKE SENSE OF THINGS. THUS, UNDERSTANDING…

This is a bibliography of articles that appeared in the "Chinese Language Teachers Association Journal" during 1966-77. The articles are listed alphabetically by author. The second part of the bibliography is a combined reference of subject and title indexed by "key words." (AMH)

How well items of information which comprise a text are learned may depend upon the semantic and syntactic relationships (ideational bonds) which exist among those items. To determine if the ability of learners to recall text information is influenced by the location of the information within the text and by syntactic contrasts among informational…

The possibility is suggested that the meanings of words are abstracted far beyond the range of cognitive concept, and that the role words play in the meaning of sentences is similar to the role phonemes play in the meanings of words. The meanings of the various forms are classed into a single paradigm known as the verb "mot-u" which is one of the…

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

Class in Bantu and its syntactic significance is discussed with reference to gender in Indo-European and semantic/syntactic features of nouns. On the basis of modern Bantu evidence and the comparative method, a maximum of 21 classes have been posited for proto-Bantu. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto-Bantu and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the disruptive effect of unknown words on reading and to examine this effect in relationship to grammatical position and modification type. Forty second grade children from two different lower middle class, semirural schools were randomly assigned to the standardization group or the experimental group.…

This test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship existing between sentences that are similar in specific semantic content but different in syntactic structure. The test consists of twenty-five items of the three-option multiple-response type, with the stem of each item being a "pattern" sentence to be matched with one of the three…

This paper explains some properties and restrictions involved in phenomena of topicalization in Japanese. The first section reviews certain properties involved in simplex topical sentences; the second section reveals certain constraints on topicalization involved in complex sentences. Section Three pursues one consequence suggested by those…

The discussion of Spanish verbs considers the problems of tense and aspect. Two tenses are used in the description: past and non-past. The past tense is considered the marked member and the non-past the unmarked member. Aspect is considered in terms of "telic" verbs which express an action tending towards a goal, and "atelic" verbs which do not…

The report presents a progress in theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, lexicography, and systems design in the development of a German-English Machine Translation System. Work in the theoretical group concentrated on intrasentenial disambiguation and on improving certain parts of the system to achieve greater economy in processing.…

Two Japanese causal connectives, "kara" and "node," are often assumed by linguists to share many distributional similarities. This paper argues that they are in fact based on semantically or logically different assumptions. The paper reviews some past treatments of the connectives and suggests an alternative analysis in terms…