The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., "Fred blicked the dog a stick") as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., "Fred blicked a stick to the dog"). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three hundred fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified…

Research supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Current research in psycholinguistics has included studies of factors influencing effective verbal communication--the effect of sequences of words and operations within an instruction; effects of instruction and self-instruction on performance; and the presentation of complex interrelated rules such as those found in legal documents, regulations,…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)

Aspects of syntax and semantics which affect sentence comprehensibility were investigated for their effects on children's understanding of the dependency relationship of subordinate to main clauses in sentences. Children in grades 2, 4, 6, and 8 were asked to select the main content from orally presented sentences by checking a picture which…

Study investigated the effects of task difficulty on the paired-associate learning of retardates when extended elaboration conditions are employed. (Authors)

A study examining the initial stages in the acquisition of the conditional system is reported. The objective was to discover how morphological productivity is related to the child's comprehension of the semantics of individual conditional types. Schachter's model of reality and unreality conditionals was used as a framework. Eight middle class,…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

The complex nature of grammar and its relevance to teaching today are explored in the light of modern linguistics. Reviewing the development and fundamental theory of transformational generative grammar, the author points out its substantial merit and also its failure to be understood as exemplary grammatical analysis of language rather than…