Texts classified according to guided reading levels (GRL) are ubiquitous in US beginning reading classrooms. This study examined features of texts across three grade bands (kindergarten, early first grade, final first grade) and the 10 GRLs within these bands. The 510 texts came from three programs with different functions in beginning reading…

Syntax, or sentence structure, plays a role in reading comprehension, but how students draw on their awareness of syntax in their reading remains unclear; the mechanism is even more ambiguous in bilingual students. In this study, we evaluated the direct and indirect contributions of syntactic awareness on first-language Chinese and second-language…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition explain language development as a gradual process of generalizing constructions through language experience. This study investigated second language learners' development of constructional knowledge from the perspective of usage-based language development. A total of 169 Korean EFL students at five…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

Replicates earlier studies and shows that children's ability to process syntactically well-formed sentences increases over the early school years. (Author/ED)

This study examined the effects of sentence length and correct syntax on sentence imitation in 54 first-, second-, and fifth-grade elementary school children. The same children were asked to perform an additional discrimination task between normal and scrambled sentences. (Author/CS)

The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

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)

By the fifth grade no differences were found between the order of adjectives in a sentence preferred by children and by adults. (ED/JD)

The results of study examining several indices of language use of normal and retarded children show the greatest difference between groups in sentence complexity and diversity. (TO)

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of relevant instructional variables operating in the post-stimulus period of prewriting on the syntactic complexity (as measured by mean T-unit length) and on syntactic clarity (as measured by number of faulty word order errors) of children's written composition. A short film was used as the…

Elementary school children were exposed to a series of modeled, tape-recorded sentences; those containing nongrammatical prepositional constructions were always vicariously rewarded, while the remaining, grammatically correct, background sentences were not. (Editor)