It is important in beginning reading instruction to let the child guess at unknown words, allowing the context to provide feedback. (JH)

Examines the effects of short term memory (STM) capacity, meaningfulness of stimuli, and age upon listeners' structuring of sentences. Results show that the interaction between STM capacity and meaningfulness (1) approached significance when data were collapsed over both age levels, and (2) was significant for one age level. Tables and references.…

Research conducted at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. (VM)

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

This paper is strongly critical of the transformational approach to language, which, according to the author, "has presented an essentially incorrect view of the nature of language by treating it as a self-contained system, independent of its use as a medium of human communication." Four aspects of transformational theory found to follow from the…

Discusses the controversy concerning language learning theories as epitomized by Chomsky and Skinner, and concludes that heredity and experience are equally important in language acquisition. (DD)

The distinction between deep and surface levels of language; the intersection of learning theory and cognitive development; and the linguistic competence of the pre-literate child and the illiterate adult are highlighted. Author argues that T-G Grammar will be a powerful aid to recognizing and dealing with problems of mass literacy education.…

On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

This is a study of the kinds of processes involved in learning the meaning of individual lexical items, and in particular how the acquisition of lexical meaning is related to the cognitive structuring of events on the one hand and the ability to produce syntactic paraphrases of a word's meaning and other related constructions on the other. It is…

Within the realm of psycholinguistics there is a need to investigate linguistic performance based on the generative transformational concept of linguistic competence, i.e., based on the speaker-listener's knowledge of his language. Psycholinguistics must determine how underlying knowledge is related to overt performance. The nominalization and…

An overview of Noam Chomsky's theories about transformational grammar and phonology is given. Since Chomsky was interested in characterizing what it is to know a language, the ways in which we demonstrate knowledge of our native language are discussed in detail. Particular emphasis is placed on describing how the transformational approach actually…

The present level of understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and capacities underlying the child's acquisition of language is reviewed in this publication. In the first chapter, linguistic theories, biological characteristics of language learning, and the distinctions between language competence and language performance are discussed. The…