Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from 3 different language environments (40 Mexican Spanish-speaking children from Monterrey, Mexico, and 40 Chicano Spanish-speaking children and 40 English-speaking children from the same public elementary school in Houston, Texas) were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal…

Studies were conducted to help determine criteria for describing the stages through which second language learners pass as they acquire a new language. The ability of 24 beginning adult students of English as a second language to supply ten morphemes in obligatory contexts was predicted on the basis of contrastive analysis between English and each…

The present paper reports on a case study investigating the acquisition of form and function of the English progressive by a seven-year-old Hebrew speaker, learning English as a second language. The paper describes the different elicitation techniques used, and discusses the suitability of such techniques for the investigation of form and…

Linguistic cohesion involves the semantic and syntactic relationships that link sentences together. Research on linguistic cohesion is related to readability and to developmental and ability-level issues in reading/writing. Instructional strategies for low-ability readers/writers include predicting comprehension problems through cohesion analysis…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

This investigation studied the performance of fifteen normal and fifteen language-disabled children on experimental pragmatic tasks and on a standardized Piagetian measure of sensorimotor intelligence. The children were matched for mean length of utterance, all subjects performing at the holophrastic level. A series of experimental measures was…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…

The pragmatic function of conveying given and new information is one of the most important universal communicative functions that language serves. This study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children and adults utilize surface cues of word order, marked grammatical structure, and emphatic stress to determine whether information is given or new…

Research by the staff and advanced students of the North Dakota Summer Institute of Linguistics is presented. In "Verb Agreement and Case Marking in Burushaski" (Stephen R. Willson), an overview of Burushaski morphology and syntax is presented, with special attention to verb agreement and case marking. "A Backwards Binding Construction in Zapotec"…

A study investigated how Chinese children and adults interpreted sentences containing universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers. The purpose was to get preliminary evidence on whether Chinese children understand scope relations and whether they know which relations are possible for particular syntactic configurations. Subjects were 192…

A study investigated whether there were commonalities of cue patterns in six selected tenth grade students' reading and writing that could be discovered from each student's respective language use and perception of the two distinct but interrelated processes. Specifically, the study explored how two above-average readers, two average readers, and…

Philippine students in grades K-6, representing different socioeconomic classes, participated in individual elicitation sessions. Using Pilipino (Tagalog) as the language of elicitation, experimenters used pictorial stimuli to elicit specific structures of English grammar, in order to discover if the subjects had mastered these structures. Only…

Foreigner talk (FT) is the term used to characterize possible adjustments in the speech of a native speaker (NS) when he or she is in conversation with a non-native speaker (NNS). The paper examines conversations between 6 native speakers and 3 non-native speakers and characterizes the speech of the native-speakers involved. The data were…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…