Home literacy environment explains between 12 and 18.5% of the variance of children's language skills. Although most authors agree that children whose parents encourage them to read tend to develop better and earlier reading skills, some authors consider that the impact of family environment in reading skills is overvalued. Probably, other…

We often come across examples of vague reference in English learning, especially college English learning. On entering college, students tend to feel at a loss since their vocabulary is required to be enlarged rapidly and a variety of reference patterns are included in their learning materials which mostly come from American and European original…

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

Verbal elements in Cairene Arabic are investigated in the light of two opposing hypotheses, one stating that the elements constitute a unit, the other stating that each element is an independent predicate. (AM)

An examination of the syntactic consequences of a notionalist grammar assumption supports the differentiation of major word classes in terms of combinations of notional features and predication or nominality components. (35 references) (Author/CB)

How syntax affects sentence prosody is explored. It is demonstrated that the lengthening of phase-final words and pausing afterward reflect a distinctly prosodic representation in which phonological constituents are arranged in a hierarchical nonrecursive structure. A model of prosodic pronunciation is also presented. (SLD)

This paper presents an alternative analysis of tough constructions for N. Chomsky's 1981 wh-movement analysis of tough constructions. To replace Chomsky's solution and to obviate the need for generalized transformations in Government-Binding (GB) theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in which the tough subject originates as an embedded…

Suggests a method for analyzing structure and process in prose using algorithms based on graph theory and rules based in syntax. Describes application of the method to essays written by 52 fourteen year old pupils on a newly learned topic in chemistry. (Author/GC)

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

The interactions among demonstrative adjectives in certain genitive phrases and WH-words in Japanese are investigated in this report on a work in progress. It is argued that certain demonstrative adjectives in Japanese, such as "ano" ("that"), occupy the highest Spec position in DP and that they block A-bar movement out of DP; genitive phrases,…

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)

Four experiments are presented in which adults learned to comprehend a new syntactic construction in their native language. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults quickly learn to comprehend the new construction and generalize it to new verbs. Experiment 3 shows that experience with the novel construction affects the processing of a…

Shows that in Hungarian, rich inflectional morphology goes on a par with rich prosody connected with word order. The article presents a model of the Hungarian sentence structure as an extension of the framework of metrical phonology. The proposed metrical syntax is based on stress reduction rules similar to those of metrical phonology. (15…

Punctuation in its elocutionary function serves as a set of instructions for reading aloud. In its syntactic function, it serves to convey meaning. Results of a study indicated that many people retain the belief in the elocutionary purpose of punctuation and are insensitive to its syntactic function. (JD)