Kindergarten and first-grade children participated in a study of the role of reciprocal and inversion reversibility in language acquisition and cognitive development. Subjects completed cognitive tasks assessing conservation, seriation, and class inclusion, and language tasks assessing the active-passive transformation and the negative…

This study investigated a psycholinguistic model of reading comprehension which attempts to relate readers' conceptual backgrounds to their ability to process syntactic structures. Specifically, the questions addressed involved the interaction between cognitive organizers and active and passive voices of verbs. Subjects included 409 third graders,…

This dissertation abstract summarizes a research study which investigated the hypothesis that bilingualism in children would result in: (1) increased ability to analyze syntax; (2) acceleration in the time of arrival of the stage of concrete operational thinking; and (3) an increase in cognitive flexibility or ability to mentally shuffle material.…

Cloze procedure, a testing method which systematically deletes words in written prose and then measures the accuracy of the information is reviewed from a historical viewpoint. Redundancy is placed in a verbal context and can be noted on three separate levels of language: (1) surface syntactic structure; (2) deep syntactic structure; and (3)…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…