IN ORDER TO MAKE A MACHINE THAT CONVERTS WRITTEN TEXT INTO SPOKEN LANGUAGE (READING MACHINE), IT WOULD BE NECESSARY TO MAP SENTENCES OF WRITTEN ENGLISH ONTO CORRESPONDING SENTENCES OF SPOKEN ENGLISH, IN A CONVERSION WHICH THE AUTHOR CALLS "SYNTHETIC ELOCUTION." IN THIS TYPE OF CONVERSION, THE ASSIGNMENT OF PROSODIC FEATURES TO SENTENCES…

This volume contains ten articles and a book review. Josef Vachek talks about "Vilem Mathesius as Forerunner of Contrastive Linguistic Studies." In "Contrastive Generative Grammar and the Psycholinguistic Fallacy," Andrew Chesterman discusses methods for accounting for simplification in foreign language learning. Michael Post compares "English…

Speech samples of 14 normal 2-year-old children and 14 Down's Syndrome 5- to 12-year-old children were analyzed to investigate the structural complexity. Results from the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure indicated that even when matched with normal children for mean length of utterance, Down's Syndrome Ss produced less syntactically…

To express that a degree of one event is conditioned by (or paralleled by) a degree of another, the "the...the..." construction with a comparative after each "the" is used. Examples include sentences such as: (1) the more dangerous mountains are to climb, the more challenging they are; (2) the more often a man has been in…

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

ONE OF THE INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION'S ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY SERIES IS CONCERNED WITH THE APPLICATION OF LINGUISTICS TO READING INSTRUCTION AND WAS PREPARED TO SERVE A WIDE RANGE OF USERS. IT CONTAINS ABOUT 100 CITATIONS OF BOOKS, RESEARCH REPORTS, DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS, AND ARTICLES FROM PERIODICALS, YEARBOOKS, AND CONFERENCE…

This article, written in Russian, propounds the application of the contrastive method in teaching the morphology of Russian to English-speaking students. The presentation is based on categorization by parts of speech. Included here is a comparative analysis of nouns (gender, number, case, expression of definite and indefinite articles),…

There are four articles in this report; the first three were written by Charles J. Fillmore: "Lexical Entries for Verbs,""Review of 'Componential Analysis of General Vocabulary--The Semantic Structure of a Set of Verbs in English, Hindi, and Japanese, Part II' by Edward Herman Bendix," and "Types of Lexical…

Teaching should reflect the facts of current language usage. This descriptive approach, when applied to reading, means that the child's reading education should focus on the realities of daily life. Syntactic analysis in reading has been handicapped by an overemphasis on lexical content at the expense of other syntactic structures. Thus, the…

This paper deals with two experiments whose purposes are to investigate the linguistic competence of young children and their receptivity to adult speech. In the free response experiment, imperative sentences were presented to 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year-olds. The sentences were minimal (a single noun), telegraphic, or full adult sentences. The youngest…

This is an outline of the major characteristics of sentences like "Ali alikuwa mwalimu" (Ali was a teacher), "Ali ni mwalimu" (Ali is a teacher), and the numerous pattern variations demonstrated by such sentences. Constructions of this kind are traditionally called copula constructions, and have been classified in terms of (1)…

This paper is a response to Lavandera's question regarding the limits of the study of language variation. Sociolinguistics is characterized by its desire to limit representational meaning much more narrowly than formal linguistics. In addition while formal linguistics views language as species-specific and designed to accomodate logical…

In an examination of the relationship between language skill and reading achievement in adults, measures of syntactic knowledge and reading achievement were obtained for 41 students in an adult basic education center. Moderate correlations were found for language skill and reading achievement, with students reading at or below the fourth grade…

Some 2700 Belgian students (grades five through twelve) participated in this study of the relationships between linguistic features of passages and passage readability estimated from cloze procedures. Clozed versions of each of 60 test passages were prepared and administered to students at various grade levels. Twenty-five linguistic features of…

This is the fourth and final report in a series dealing with the impact of the modes of discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) on written syntactic complexity at the elementary school level. The first three reports dealt in turn with the three grade levels involved in the study (third, fourth, and fifth grades). This…