Kuczaj challenged the hypotheses that young children construct utterances by applying transformation rules to an abstract underlying structure. It is contended that Kuczaj's alternative hypotheses do not account for Hurford's data, and some of Kuczaj's new evidence actually supports the Transformational Hypothesis. (SW)

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

This article discusses various studies that deal with understanding written and oral discourse and demonstrates the implications of these studies for second language teaching. (CFM)

This newsletter reports on phenomena at the intersection of linguistics and psychoanalysis and psychiatry. This issue consists of the following articles: (1) an editorial entitled "Idioms, How We Love/Have You!", on the possible reasons behind the use of idioms; (2) "The Last Renaissance (Language in a Drug Rehabilitation Community)," by Harold…

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

This study considers the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors (social and cognitive) in children's production of coordinate structures involving conjunction reduction. Two aspects of pragmatic context were considered: (1) the pattern of uncertainty or redundancy in a complex action sequence, and (2) the perceptual grouping of objects…