Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)

Expands on the authors' (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on "wh"-movement sentences by Chinese-speaking learners of English. The article compares the difficulty second-language learners have in parsing subject "wh"-traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

The effects of intonation morphemes on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element were studied using synthetic speech stimuli. Both child and adult subjects processed the sentences better when they retained standard subject-verb-object order, suggesting that the morphemes serve as processing instructions.…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made…

A discussion of young children's production of English utterances with missing constituents focuses on the omission of subjects. The theory that young children have different grammars from those of adults is disputed, and it is suggested that, instead, subjects are omitted due to performance factors. Processing limitations in child language are…

This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different…

Seventy good readers and 70 poor readers who were students at a community college participated in a study that examined the role of adversative connectives in helping students integrate information across sentence boundaries. Three functions of adversative connectives were examined: contrast or conflict, parallel points, and foregrounding…

Issues in syntactic processing, that aspect of the human sentence comprehension mechanism that recovers a syntactic structure for a given word string, are discussed. In particular, two structural ambiguities in Mandarin Chinese are examined and their successful parsing within the framework of minimal parsing models is discussed. Recent work…

A review of the literature reveals that three writing skills have been of particular interest to writing researchers recently. First, work on planning the rhetorical strategy recognizes three components of the planning process: prewriting, pausing, and reviewing what has been written. Second, research on audience analysis indicates that maturity…

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

Compares the processing of English words by Chinese-English bilinguals with that of monolingual English speakers. Subjects read and rated English words for their contribution to sentence structure and meaning. It was found that bilinguals generally rated English words as contributing more to sentence structure and meaning than did monolinguals.…