Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

This volume contains six articles. In "Integrational Linguistics as a Basis for Contrastive Studies," Hans-Heinrich Lieb discusses the problems associated with complex contrastive analysis. Hanne Martinet's "A Functional and Contrastive Analysis of Attributive Adjectives Endings in '-ant' and in '-ende' in French and Danish,…

Readability estimates are usually based on measures of word difficulty and measures of sentence difficulty. Word difficulty is measured in two ways: by the structural size and complexity of words or by reference to phonomena of language use, such as word-list frequency or the regularity of spelling patterns. Sentence difficulty is measured only in…

This study compared syntactic complexity and vocabulary diversity in two groups of books that can be used for reading aloud to preschool children: books recommended by authorities in reading and children's literature for reading aloud and "grocery store" books (small, inexpensive picture books that can be purchased in grocery stores).…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

The 2,459 entries in this bibliography on transformational grammar and related areas are written in, and deal with, a wide variety of languages. The listings, covering available publications up to early 1968, include texts, journal articles, papers and other works, and reviews of some of the more outstanding writings. (AMM)

Findings of a seminar which explored the current linguistics methods of teaching elementary reading and examined the background of this approach and some programs constant with it are presented. The seminar established the following set of criteria for describing the important characteristics of a linguistics method: (1) task definitions of…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

This chapter, to be included in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," edited by P.A. Mussen, deals with the connection between the acquisition of language and the growth of intellect, and the connection between both of these and the process of maturation. The author feels that various theories of development cannot account for the child's…

Three principles are integral to any reading theory which provides reading teachers and researchers with the linguistic explanatory power required by linguistic theory. A clear understanding of language is dependent on the knowledge of what language is and how it works. There is an important distinction between competence and performance; most…

Substitutes in English (such as "he,""she,""it,""one,""do so,""thus,""there," and "such") participate in an intricate network of systems. This study aims to identify those English substitutes which are words or word sequences and to describe their workings in some of…

The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according…

This paper is part of a current dissertation project exploring the relationships between constructs in linguistic theory and pattern of language behavior in aphasic adults. The author feels that linguists have done little enough work in the area of speech pathology yet they have discussed at length the distinction between competence and…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…