This study related the style of writing found in literature for children and the relative level of readability of this material. Cloze tests of readability on 10 passages from five juvenile biographies of Lincoln were given in 1 week to a hemogeneously grouped upper elementary school reading class (n=28) in suburban Detroit. The mean T-unit…

Procedures and findings of three reading comprehension studies are reported. The first study compared cloze readability test scores for 130 pairs of students (grade 3 through college) with scores indicating the information gained from reading. Students gained little or no information when they could not answer more than 25 percent of the cloze…

In contrast to conventional information storage and retrieval systems in which a body of knowledge is thought of as an indexed codex of documents to which access is obtained by an appropriately indexed query, this interdisciplinary study aims at an understanding of what is "knowledge" as distinct from a "data file," how this knowledge is acquired,…

The aim of this study is to supply the Russian language teacher with information about the patterns most frequently and consistently occurring in common speech. It begins with a discussion of normative grammar and linguistic reality, colloquial language, the sentence, sentence length, short expressions, and generative grammar. Sentences used in…

This introductory text in Punjabi (also spelled Panjabi) is intended primarily for those whose mother tongue is not Punjabi but are native speakers of other Indian languages. Some familiarity with the Punjabi cultural items is presupposed. The non-Indian may, however, also be able to use this text with profit since the lessons are graded. The…

This report gives the results obtained in the semantic and syntactic analysis of the Japanese particles "de,""ni,""e," and "wo" in comparison to their equivalents in English, German, and Spanish. The study is based on the so-called "Correlational Analysis" as proposed by Ernst von Glaserfeld. The…

In order to mechanize the processing of natural language, the linguist must make the machine interpret the meaning, or semantic content of the language, in some way or other. This means that the machine should extract not only syntactic but also semantic information from the source sentence through the analysis of it. In this paper, the authors…

To find out what factors are involved in a child's learning of syntax, investigators studied the syntactic complexity of the language a mother and child use when talking to each other. The complexity measure used was one developed by Dr. Sheldon Frank and Dr. Harry Osser, and is based on the concepts of generative grammar and transformations.…

This document represents an attempt to demonstrate a way of writing meaningful objectives for teaching English as a Second Language. Behavioral objectives answer the questions: (1) what must the student learn, (2) what is the best way for him to learn it, and (3) how does one know when he has learned it? These model behavioral objectives attempt…

This material was designed to present the essential features of English phrase and clause structure, for the benefit of both native speakers and learners of English as a second language. The author has followed a "deliberately eclectic" approach. The diagrams are developments of the type discussed and exemplified in Hockett, 1958, and…

A preliminary study of the syntactic characteristics of the imperative construction in modern Chinese is presented. The term "imperative" is used to refer to the type of syntactic construction which is marked by an implicit or explicit second person subject, and which expresses a direct command. Indirect or implied commands expressed by a…

The distinction between formal and casual English as reflected in the lexicon, in phonology, and in syntax is studied. Formality is treated as separate from other categorizations of language such as geographical origin of the speaker, social class of the participants, or specific context of discourse. The study was restricted mainly to the use of…

These indexes, a set of measures of growth in syntactic fluency, are derived from the research in written syntax of Hunt and Christensen. They are a means of linguistic analysis of each T-unit (independent clause and its modifiers) in a writing sample. The indexes include: mean T-unit length; number of words in free modifiers, final position only;…

In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in the analysis of errors adults make while learning a second language. The underlying objective of most of these analyses has been to reveal the systematicity of adult errors in an effort to understand the process of adult second language learning. This paper deals with errors from a…

The effect of sentence length and syntactic structure on the repeatability of sentences by native and foreign speakers of English was investigated in this study using 18 native English speakers, 30 advanced foreign students, and 114 intermediate level foreign students. Eighty-four sentences were presented for repetition, varying according to word…