The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to "measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level". Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform…

Argues that psycholinguists should become aware of the information available to readers at levels beyond the individual sentence. (RB)

One of the ways to handle the increasing demands on readers' skills is to make writing more readable. The problem has two different aspects: predicting how readable writing will be to a reader, and producing writing that is readable to that reader. Prediction is relatively simple, and can be done statistically with readability formulas. Production…

Describes three experiments designed to investigate the effect of sentence organization on the comprehension of procedural directions. Ease of comprehension was determined by measuring reading time for two different sentence patterns, while subjects followed instructions to operate an unfamiliar device. Experimental results showed that…

Investigates how performance on syntactic structures is affected by the complexity of the surrounding sentence. To investigate possible relationships, two classifications of syntactic structures were tested in both simple and complex sentences. (RC)

Reports on a study that investigated the position of text line break with respect to the phrase structure of a sentence in order to determine its effect on children's reading fluency. Concludes that line breaks within and between phrases cause less disruption when they occur near the end of a sentence. (FL)

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (RS)

Two hypotheses were tested in three experiments concerned with the componential storage of meaning. The complexity hypothesis predicted that a verb with many subpredicates would lead to poor memory strength between the surrounding nouns. The connectivity hypothesis predicted that verbs with many subpredicates would lead to greater memory strength…

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

Subjects read sets of active or passive sentences, and an active or passive question was asked about one. Errors were compared. Results suggest that surface form of a single sentence is retained; surface and deep structures are retained for two, and only deep structures of four and eight sentences. (CHK)

This paper describes an innovative method for teaching reading comprehension in a second language. The underlying assumption of this method is that a student who reads in his native language does not need to learn a theoretical system of grammar rules in the traditional sense of the term, since he already possesses the ability to recognize words…

Three experiments test the relationship between implicit speech and comprehension processes for meaningful material. (Author/AM)

Suggests using visual cues such as boldface type, indenting, and color coding to help students identify important words in sentences and relationships between sentences. (MKM)

The effects of topical coherence on the comprehension of two groups of non-native (Finnish) users of English and a control group of English native speakers were observed, with reaction times from a visual word monitoring task as the dependent measure. The experiment examined the ability of intermediate and advanced second language students to…

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…