Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform…

The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

Current transformational linguistic theory holds that there are two levels of sentence structure, derived constituent or surface structure and underlying or deep structure. Both have been proposed as the memory representation of sentences, but recent evidence suggests that the latter is the more likely. However, two recent studies have directly…

Sensitivity to syntactic structure can be increased by direct instruction. (JH)

Compositions written by 66 second grade boys and girls in one control and two experimental groups were analyzed to study the effect of 21 instructional sessions in sentence expansion and to determine which of the instructional methods employed was most beneficial to a particular sex group. Lesson plans for the control group were parallel to two…

This study sought to broaden the scope of teacher training in English by incorporating an experimental design in practice teaching. The control group, 20 ninth graders whose IQ's averaged 95, studied narrative-descriptive writing and transformational grammar, writing the same number of compositions as the two experimental groups. The low…