This article describes the complex cognitive and linguistic challenges of summarizing expository text at vocabulary, syntactic, and rhetorical levels. It then outlines activities to help ABE/ESL learners develop corresponding skills.

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

Three experiments examine whether a naturalistic reading task can induce long-lasting changes of syntactic patterns in memory. Judgment of grammatical acceptability is used as an indirect test of memory for sentences that are identical or only syntactically similar to those read earlier. In previous research (Luka & Barsalou, 2005) both sorts of…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

This article presents 34 characteristics of texts and tasks ("text features") that can make continuous (prose), noncontinuous (document), and quantitative texts easier or more difficult for adolescents and adults to comprehend and use. The text features were identified by examining the assessment tasks and associated texts in the national…

Purpose: To test the hypotheses that adults who stutter will be slower in producing syntactically complex sentences than fluent adults and will benefit more from sentence-structure priming than will fluent adults. Method: Adults who stutter (n = 15) and fluent adults (n = 15) participated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, adults in both groups…

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of syntactic complexity and task demands on construction of utterances using picture communication symbols by participants from 3 age groups with no communication disorders. Method: Participants were 30 children (7;0 [years;months] to 8;11), 30 teenagers (12;0 to 13;11), and 30 adults (18 years and…