Analyzes the nature of punctuation, its functions (syntactic, suprasegmental, and semantic), its role in written language, and punctuation as grapheme. (AM)

Suggests that by reading aloud, students may come to a greater awareness of the three subsystems of the English punctuation system--inclusion, sentence stops, and sentence marks. (HOD)

The psychological process of segmenting sentences into meaningful units or "chunks" is believed to be an important aspect of text comprehension processes. The most characteristic type of parsing task elicits perceptions of text structure indirectly by asking individuals to make judgments about pause placement in sentences. In four…