In order to discern whether sixth grade students with differing levels of reading achievement (as measured by the Paragraph Meaning subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test) also differed in the level of syntactic maturity evidenced in their response to a sentence combining task, a syntactic structure inventory of eight sentence-combining stimulus…

The function of syntax as a factor in comprehension is described in terms of transformations of basic sentence patterns. Examples of transformations of the basic indirect object sentence are included to show emphasis, questions, negations, and coordinate or subordinate relationships. The term grammeme is defined as the minimum unit of syntactical…

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)

Research funded by a contract from the U.S. Office of Education to Rutgers University. (DS)

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

This paper focuses on four studies of pupils' reading comprehension completed at the University of Alberta. A number of investigators have described the acquisition and use of connectives by pupils and have indicated the importance of connectives in the development of abstract logical thinking. (Teachers often consider these words too simple to…

Sentence patterns are often crucial to the degree of understanding a child derives from the printed page, and if he is to fully understand what he reads, he must be able to analyze the written language patterns in which the information is conveyed. This study analyzed selected passages from three grade 4 basal reader series to determine which…

Test questions were phrased according to different sentence structures in a study of the complexity level of items for 220 third-grade children. Both the sensitivity of wh-questions (who, what, where, etc.) as a dependent variable and differences between wh-questions eliciting subject and predicate nouns were investigated. Effects of paraphrase…