Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…

This report describes research that focused on the comprehension and composition of simple texts. The first section reviews the overall goals and theoretical perspectives of the project. The second section describes the following studies carried out during the project: analysis and extension of prior thinking-out-loud (TOL) data, TOL and reading…

Two experiments investigated the focusing properties of thematic roles, and a third examined the view that thematic role preferences reflect a focusing on the consequences of the represented event. Results focus on the structure of represented events, top-down and bottom-up processes, thematic hierarchies and pronoun comprehension. (35 references)…

Drawn from a conference that addressed the role of sentence combining in the teaching of writing, the papers in this collection are divided into three sections: the theory of sentence combining, research in sentence combining, and sentence combining in the classroom. The 22 papers discuss a variety of topics, including the following: (1) sentence…