Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

Reports on two studies exploring the contrast effects in judgments of messages exhibiting high or low lexical and syntactic diversity. Suggests that listeners are sensitive to variations in lexical diversity but not syntactic diversity. (RL)

Human beings who have been forced to acquire language through non-auditory modalities characteristically display an impoverished syntactic system. I.M. Schlessinger (1970) has shown, for example, that users of sign language have difficulty in communicating syntactic relations such as "subject of main verb,""object of the verb," and "indirect…

A discourse analysis of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants reveals these non-native speakers of English lack the mastery of those cues, such as prosody and topicalization, that allow native speaker/listeners to perceive intended relationships among the ideas presented. (DJD)

A study examined second language learners' interaction in the interaction stage of dictogloss to see how it might facilitate language learning. Dictogloss, a class activity, involves the teacher reading a passage aloud in class at natural speed, students taking notes for reconstruction, and students producing, in pairs or small groups, their own…

The work reported here is part of an ongoing project to develop a language comprehension assessment instrument that: (1) is sensitive enough to pinpoint the particular language phenomena that are causing difficulty or have not been mastered, and (2) is also broad enough in scope to provide a credible and useful description of language proficiency.…

Presents a replication of experiments which found that input practice is better than output practice for comprehension skills, and no worse than output practice for production skills in a second language (Spanish). Findings reveal that these patterns are obscured when the testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question…

This paper examines certain of the cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the comprehension of syntactic structure. Accessibility is studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. These children can correctly identify subjects and also predicate phrases with…

IN THE PRE-NUCLEATION STAGE, THE STUDENT IS CONCERNED WITH STORING, OR INTERNALIZING, THREE KINDS OF LANGUAGE PATTERNS--(1) ONE REPRESENTING THE SOUND STRUCTURE, (2) ANOTHER INVOLVING A PORTION OF THE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE, AND (3) A THIRD--CALLED SANDHI VARIATION--ARISING FROM THE ACCIDENTAL CO-OCCURRENCE OF CERTAIN SOUNDS MAKING UP THE ELEMENTS OF…

This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

A study was conducted to determine the extent to which listening comprehension is impaired when students are confronted with the colloquial use of French, as opposed to its formal use. It was found that amoung 128 prospective French teachers who participated in the study, there existed a low comprehension level of colloquial French, a discrepancy…

The reflections in this paper represent part of a study of disadvantaged 13 to 15 year-old children of immigrants in Switzerland. This section deals with the process of learning spelling. In order to observe the students' learning, the same dictation was given four times during the school year. The results were studied intuitively and…