Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

This research project was motivated by results of earlier work (Katzer et al., 1982) on the overlap among document representations. In the earlier study, one representation used in the INSPEC database proved to perform unexpectedly well in comparison with other commonly used representations, such as controlled vocabulary or free-text terms from…

A 2-year study of optimal structures for multimedia instruction is being conducted to provide experimentally validated guidelines for the design of computer-based instruction generation systems and for human instruction in a multimedia setting. In order to obtain for analysis a significant range of the possible discourse structures that occur in…

Discusses grammar and spelling instruction in The Netherlands for students aged 10-15 and describes an intelligent computer-assisted instructional environment consisting of a linguistic expert system, a didactic module, and a student interface. Three prototypes are described: BOUWSTEEN and COGO for analyzing sentences, and TDTDT for conjugating…

The development of a new grammar of English for machine translation systems at Weidner Communications Corporation is described. Although the project began with the intention of simply modifying the grammar rules already in use in the translation system, the reorganization of the grammar was deemed necessary for providing a principled manner of…

Contributing to current research in narrative comprehension, this booklet describes three steps in content analysis of texts: dividing text into content units, identifying the connections between each content unit, and classifying each content unit as central, supportive, or distracting. The first section of the report presents an overview of the…

Designed to investigate the types of responses given to a sentence completion task when constraint elements of word order, word form, redundancy, distance between lexical items, and the interaction among these elements are considered, this instrument consists of 34 sentences, half of which are high associative sentences, while the other half are…

Computer programs for linguistic analysis of language samples from bilingual children were surveyed in order to evaluate their usefulness. Eight programs which could be implemented on the UCLA IBM 370/3033 computer were considered. It was determined that the Computer Assisted Language Analysis System was the most promising in terms of capabilities…

A classification of propositions (consisting of a verb and its arguments) is presented with a stipulation of the properties of each type, and clarification is given for how the classfication and the properties function in the interaction between propositions and Japanese aspectual auxiliary verbs. The different types of verbs include: (1) state…

An examination focuses on several instances in which consonant mutation, whereby the initial consonant of a word or constituent undergoes morphophonological changes, occurs in standard literary Welsh. The syntactic and morphological means by which these mutations take place are considered, with emphasis on how an account of these mutations fits…

Two experiments with 40 children (grades 4 to 8) found the children often used their knowledge of derivational suffixes in defining low-frequency derivatives, and knowledge of suffixes was significantly correlated with suffix production in a nonsense task. The children's morphological awareness of derivational suffixes included semantic…

A system of quantitative techniques for describing the English language from a number of perspectives, intended for the language analyst, is presented. The grammar combines an emerging knowledge of semantics with existing detailed knowledge of syntax. The primary unit of analysis is the predication, a group of related concepts expressed as a…

Designed to divide recall protocols for subsequent category analysis, this instrument equates surface syntactic forms with semantic ideas. The instrument defines two types of syntactic proposition--a base syntactic proposition, the simplest independent prediction (structurally) that may be used to convey information, and an alternate syntactic…

This study compared the effect of productivity (a correlate of suffix frequency) on derivational suffix use in 69 elementary and middle school students' derivational suffix use. Twenty-three students had language-learning disabilities (LLD). Students with and without LLD used highly productive suffixes but LLD students were less accurate in…

A structured analysis of three basal readers written for grades 2-5 was conducted using the T-unit (any independent clause) as the primary unit of analysis. The number of T-units per 100 words, the number of words per T-unit, the number of clauses per T-unit, and the number of morphemes per T-unit (a new index of linguistic maturity) are reported.…