Discusses the unaccusative trap hypothesis, which provides a developmental account for a variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic phenomena in second language English, Japanese, and Chinese. (Author/VWL)

Reports on bilingual acquisition of syntax. Draws on data from a bilingual English-Dutch child whose word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising. (Author/VWL)

Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 controls participated in a study testing sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. Participants with L/LD performed significantly below the comparison group, suggesting that this skill is problematic…

The study examined whether college students (35 normally achieving writers, 35 writers with learning disabilities, and 35 underprepared writers) differed in their ability to utilize the semantic roles and syntactic rules needed to apply cohesive referencing in written text. Among findings were that all groups made effective use of pronoun…

Focuses on the language of civil engineering as manifested in the professional journal "Civil Engineering ASCE." Articles are analyzed, both syntactically and lexically, in terms of three major rhetorical functions: description, prescription, and persuasion. (17 references) (GLR)

Object deletion in Classical Arabic is semantically marked on two levels: ( 1) dropping the object deliberately but functionally; and (2) emptying the object slot and focusing on the verbal action. The second level of object deletion stresses the verbal action. (20 references) (GLR)

Comparison of dysphasic children (N=8) with control children found that the dysphasic children's language development was both delayed and deviant, and that the children's deviant syntax structures were the result of insufficient language processing and could not be traced back to structural characteristics of the sentences used by their mothers.…

Presents a model for the a priori analysis of natural language queries which uses an algorithm to transform the query into a logical pattern that is used to determine the answerability of the query. The results of testing by a prototype system implemented in PROLOG are discussed. (20 references) (CLB)

The first of two papers discusses natural language searching as a user performance enhancement tool, focusing on artificial intelligence applications for information retrieval and problems with natural language processing. The second presents a conceptual framework for further development and future design of front ends to online bibliographic…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

An analysis of syntactic complexity was performed on spontaneously generated oral stories obtained from 93 learning disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students at age levels from 8 through 13 years. Results indicated almost identical rates of correct usage and similar patterns of usage between LD and NA subjects on all measures. (Author/DB)

Analyzes the "easy to be V" structure in terms of the semantic features of sentences with this structure. These sentences can be classified into types, ranging from the "prototype" with the most features contributing to its transparency, to the "peripheral" with the fewest of such features. (Author/CB)

The article offers teachers suggestions on ways to instruct elementary students in the vocabulary of mathematics. It gives examples of math difficulties at the elementary school level, math difficulties related to vocabulary, and math difficulties related to problem solving. (DB)

Describes a model that displays structures necessary to map between the conceptual and external levels in database management systems, using an algorithm that maps the syntactic representations of tuples onto semantic representations. A technique for translating tuples into natural language sentences is introduced, and a system implemented in…

The study found that revising basal reader stories to improve text coherence resulted in improved comprehension for hearing impaired readers. Findings suggest that current efforts to control readability through stringent syntactic guidelines may result in texts that are more difficult, rather than less difficult, for hearing impaired readers to…