This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

Author contends that raw grammaticality judgments cannot be interpreted always at face value, and that to obtain true" grammaticality judgments one must at least factor out effects that are the results of the inner workings of rhetoric and logic. (Author/MB)

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

Analyzes a selection of papers centered around the idea that it is possible to consider the evidence of language variation in linguistic analysis. The papers were presented at the 1972 colloquium on "New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English," Georgetown University. (AM)

Clark's Semantic Feature Acquisition theory of semantic development is reviewed and evaluated against the recent experimental literature with special reference to the acquisition of English antonyms. (Author/MP)

Preschool children were tested on their comprehension of the comparatives, "taller,""shorter,""more," and "less" in five types of sentences. Results suggest that many children can understand two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on second-clause subjects pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun. (SDH)

In a study extending and refining Carol Chomsky's research, 48 Arabic speaking children aged six, eight, and ten were tested for their comprehension of imperatives using the complement-requiring verbs Ask, Tell, and Promise. Clear support for children's overgeneralization of the minimal distance principle was found only with Promise constructions.…

Research supported by the Fonds National belge de la Recherche Scientifique. (DD)

Preliminary version of this article presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1971. Research and preparation of the paper supported in part by an Intramural Grant from the Regents of the University of California to T. Kenney. (VM)