To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Previous research has established that readers' eye movements are sensitive to the difficulty with which a word is processed. One important factor that influences processing is the fit of a word within the wider context, including its plausibility. Here we explore the influence of plausibility in counterfactual language processing. Counterfactuals…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers' approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the "simple view of…

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In…

An online picture description methodology was used to investigate the interaction between lexical and syntactic information in spoken sentence production. In response to arrays of moving pictures, participants generated prepositional sentences, such as "The apple moves towards the dog," as well as coordinate noun phrase sentences, such…

Background: Sentence construction and syntactic organization are known to be poor in children with specific language impairments (SLI), but little is known about the way in which children with SLI approach language tasks, and static standardized tests contribute little to the differentiation of skills within the population of children with…

Investigated five-year-olds' abilities to determine the reference of anaphoric pronouns. Children had difficulty when a sentence contained more than one pronoun, especially when assigning the reference of a pronoun requiring an inference. The children's difficulties stemmed from forgetting premise information and from having problems in carrying…

Nine children suffering from Landau-Kleffner (L-K) syndrome and 25 children with developmental expressive disorders were tested for comprehension of English grammatical structures in spoken, written, and signed language modalities. L-K children demonstrated comprehension problems in all three language modalities and tended to treat language as…

Investigated levels of grammatical knowledge among 99 trainee primary school teachers in England and Wales. The study focused on clause and sentence structure to investigate the students' ability to apply their knowledge to analysis of children's writing and to explore the implications of proposed revisions to English in the national curriculum.…

This booklet provides information and teaching strategies to support the teaching of sentence level work in Year 7 (England). Focus in the booklet is on using the sentence level objectives in the context of shared writing, and the emphasis is on putting knowledge and language to use, rather than treating it in isolation. Care has been taken to…

Adapted for whole class use, this unit of study is aimed at helping children in England who have reached Level 3 in English at Key Stage 2 and who need further help with the skills of writing to enable them to achieve Level 4. It focuses on extending pupils' range and control of sentences in writing. The sessions include the proper use of…

Developed for use in small groups, this unit of study is aimed at helping children in England who have reached Level 3 in English at Key Stage 2 and who need further help with the skills of writing to enable them to achieve Level 4. It focuses on extending pupils' range and control of sentences in writing. The sessions include the proper use of…

Two sentence-combining tests and one piece of free writing per student provided the data in a study designed to determine whether the heavy writing emphasis given British children in their elementary years gives them significantly greater writing skill than their counterparts in the United States, who write comparatively infrequently. The data…

These foundation units are aimed at pupils working within Level 2 entry to Year 7. They are designed to remind pupils what they know and take them forward. The units also will teach phonics knowledge from consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words to long vowel phonemes. The writing units focus on developing the following skills: understanding what a…