The author responds to W. Arndt's criticisms of the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test, a test for assessing receptive and expressive grammar in young children. (SBH)

Syntactic analysis identifies the "conductor wires" permitting the listener to conceptualize the speaker's image of reality from information furnished by the linguistic message. Syntactic study is thus situated in the economy of the communication process. Mood, aspect and tense are studied in this framework. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A study of the syntactic organization of discourse and an attempt to show that in all languages organization is necessary for meaningful utterances. Topics covered are: the necessity of regular predication in French; a definition of the subject-verb unity; and the non-verbal predicate. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

In four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds were studied in an elicited imitation task wherein the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure and pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction. Both factors were found to affect imitation. (Author/RM)

Speech samples were elicited by means of the Bilingual Syntax Measure from eleven children ages 27-48 months, covering a wide span of linguistic development. Presence or absence of eleven functors was scored in obligatory occasions and an acquisition sequence determined using three methods of speech analysis. (CHK)

This paper attempts to show how a variety of phenomena in Chinese can be explained by means of a different approach to grammatical analysis. This approach consists of analyzing sentence structure from the viewpoint of communicative function; sentences are regarded as links in a chain of discourse. (CHK)

A report on a study in progress of the acquisition of a syntax rule: inversion in questions beginning with "Wh..". Its purpose is to show how certain modifications of linguistic theory and practice can contribute to this study and to psychology of language in general. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

The Sentence Combining Test was administered to three groups of college students (N=45) identified as learning disabled (LD), normal, and basic (underachieving) writers. Among results was that LD writers made a higher percentage of meaning errors across all subtests. (Author/JW)

Analysis of spoken repetitions of linguistically-controlled sentences by severely and profoundly hearing-impaired 6- to 19-year-olds (N=45) revealed that grammatical category significantly affected articulatory accuracy of target phonemes, while no effects due to syntactic complexity were noted. No differences were seen in performance between age…

Describes a study that examines the effect of an adult-child discourse structure on the word combination produced by 17 children at the single-word utterance level. There was a significant difference between pretest and posttest multiword production for the experimental group of six children, but no difference for the control group. (SED)

Typical contemporary ways of forming word derivations and composite words in French are outlined and discussed, and the distinctions between different types of composites are noted. (MSE)

A language-delayed five-year-old underwent a pragmatic treatment program on topic performance involving the initiation of memory- and future-related topics. Within six months, the child exhibited an increase in such topic initiation and in general level of syntactic development. (Author/CB)

Discusses the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the contraction of prepositions and determiners in German to emphasize that the communicative function of certain syntactic forms can only be understood, and should therefore only be taught, within the framework of contextual analysis. (CB)

A review of Hunt's research to find ways of measuring the growth of syntactic proficiency in American school children explores the possibilities of applying these measures to groups of British native and non-native speakers of English and developing them for use in teaching and testing. (Author/CB)