This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

A study was conducted of the language development of a hearing child whose mother was deaf and communicated only in sign and whose father was hearing and communicated in both sign and oral language. Results showed similarities in development between the two modalities as well as similarity between development in two separate modalities and two…

In recent years, T-unit analysis has been applied in second language research to characterize the syntactic nature of linguistic input and to assess the syntactic maturity of the learners' written production. This measure has been seen to provide an objective and reliable method of determining the overall complexity of language samples. However,…

THIS PAPER IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES PRESENTING THE FEATURES OF SYSTEMS DESIGNED FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AT THE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH CENTER (LRC) OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. ONGOING RESEARCH IS EXPANDING THE APPLICATION OF THESE SYSTEMS TO INCLUDE NOT ONLY NATURAL LANGUAGE BUT PROGRAMING LANGUAGES AS WELL. THIS PAPER DISCUSSES…

STORIES DICTATED BY STUDENTS FROM GRADES 1 AND 2 OF SCHOOLS IN A POVERTY AREA OF TUCSON, ARIZONA WERE TRANSCRIBED BY CLASSROOM TEACHERS AND ARE REPRODUCED WITH ACCOMPANYING SEMANTIC ANALYSES. ANALYZED FOR BASIC PREDICATION FORMS AND MAJOR FORM-CLASS CONCEPTS WHICH ARE CONTAINED IN THEM, THE STORIES ARE PRESENTED TO SHOW (1) DIFFERENCES IN THE…

This report discusses a study of a Norwegian six-year-old child's acquisition of English syntax in a second language environment. Interrogative and negative sentences which require periphrasis with "do" are the forms considered in the analysis. Although the formal aim of the study is limited to an effort at discovering more about developmental…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

Starting with a model for explaining comprehension and noncomprehension of verbal material in terms of a match/mismatch principle, this project developed a scale of language usage and explored hypotheses about how comprehension may become possible if a child does not now comprehend some particular oral or written text. Eight separate reports are…

The purposes of this study were (1) to provide a method for the quantitative study of grammatical (syntactic) structures which is coherent, systematic, and broad, yet capable of refinement to accommodate details, and (2) to search for the developmental trends in the frequency of various grammatical structures written by students of average…

Recent work in word-order typology has demonstrated that the dominant order of verbs and objects (or complements) correlates well with the general ordering tendencies of languages. The work on German reported in this paper suggests, however, that certain traits, such as the order of adverbials, are influenced not only by general ordering…

This paper is intended to be the first part of a study contrasting the subjunctive of French with that of English and comparing it in both languages with the syntactic devices that can replace it. It examines the syntactic constraints on the use of subjunctive forms in French, the semantic contrast between indicative and subjunctive forms, and the…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

This paper discusses interrogative structures, based on the results and conclusions derived from comparing the interrogative systems of 79 randomly selected languages. The paper begins by listing a number of generalizations about interrogative structures based on disparate observations in the field. These generalizations constitute the basis for…

This study is concerned with the description of compound sentences, relative clauses, and complement clauses in Standard Persian within a generative-transformational grammar. Compound sentences are divided into conjunctive, disjunctive, and adversative types on the basis of the semantic relations they express. A conjunctive clause is either…

This paper defines the grammatical role of a particle in Swahili in terms of the semantic information which it contributes to all utterances in which it occurs. The particle -A occurs in the syntactic configuration Noun 1 -A Noun 2 and has been traditionally described as reflecting relations of possession and attribution between the two nouns in…