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…

Although speech and writing both contain functional varieties as well as many similar mechanical aspects, mature writing contains a number of conventions (words, idioms, constructions) rarely found in mainstream native speech. Among areas of contrast are vocabulary, syntactic constructions--especially punctuation--and the more complex use of…

This dissertation describes the grammatical structure of Shuswap, an American Indian language of the Salishan family spoken in British Columbia, Canada. The research was carried out on the Naskanlith Reserve near Chase, British Columbia, during the summers of 1966-69. Prior to this study, the language was last investigated before the turn of the…

This investigation studied the relationships of children's reading achievement to their ability to reproduce orally selected phonological, morphological, and syntactical structures presented in "The Gloria and David Beginning English, Series No. 20, Test 6" (GDBE). The subjects were 198 Spanish-surnamed and black third graders. Reading achievement…

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

Syntactic abilities in oral language of twenty normal and twenty dyslexic second grade boys were investigated. The major hypothesis was that dyslexic children with reading comprehension difficulties are deficient in oral syntax. The concept of syntax was subdivided into five categories: (1) recognition of melody pattern, (2) recognition of…

If in reading a sentence a reader finds something unfamiliar in lexical meaning or grammatical structures, the meaning of the written material may be ambiguous to him. Sometimes the context will help to clarify the meaning of an unfamiliar element, but often it won't. Understanding what is read involves not only the process of reasoning, but also…

This study assessed the effectiveness of five hours of distributed training on three-year-old children's comprehension and production of the passive, negative, possessive and negative passive syntactic structures. A comprehension test identified 20 children who did not evidence understanding of these structures. Subject were randomly assigned to…

Translation, viewed as a process of linguistic summation, is considered on the levels of morphology, syntax, phonology, and vocabulary. Random variables which bear on loss/gain ratios are examined in formulae illustrating the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity in the translation process. Implications of theory are illustrated through…

This paper examines the relationship that exists between the syntactic and phonological components of the transformational-generative model insofar as their formal structures are concerned. It is demonstrated that the number and importance of the structural similarities between the syntax and the phonology make it necessary to provide for them in…

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…

Students in grades 4, 5, or 6 can learn to write more concretely, accurately, and deliberately by employing three strategies: (1) elimination of those words or phrases that garble meaning or repeat unnecessarily; (2) substitution of more specific, concrete, and generally more appropriate expressions for ones that are vague and unimaginative; and…

The O'Donnell "Perception of Alternate Structures Test" (P. A. S. T.) was designed to produce a more efficient measure of perception of syntactic features. Like Simons'"Deep Structure Recovery Test" (D. S. R. T.), the P. A. S. T. has two sentences in each item that are similar in underlying structure. Like the earlier O'Donnell "Test of…

This collection of essays includes topics from several areas of linguistics with special attention paid to the issue of language diversity, especially as confronted in the multilingual and multicultural southwestern United States. The first section contains essays on various topics ranging from the value of abstract syntax to "Homophones and the…

Syntactic and semantic cueing were examined as used in oral reading by 30 college freshmen, half of whom were higher in vocabulary on the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and half of whom were higher in comprehension scores on the same test. The subjects were selected from 168 freshmen, all of whom were poor readers and spoke predominantly English. All…