This study investigated the pattern of growth in syntactic fluency of college-preparatory students in grades 7-12. Its primary purpose was to examine the syntactic structures employed in samples of narrative writing by the 12 different groups (totaling 216 students) that comprised the study sample. A secondary purpose was to determine which of…

Applications of research in psycholinguistics, particularly Noam Chomsky's research, have suggested some drastic innovations in the practices of both the classroom teacher and the child development researcher. For example, more emphasis is needed upon asking what a speaker knows about the grammar of the language with less concern about how…

It is possible to apply Lamb's stratificational theory and analysis to English graphonomy, but additional notation devices must be used to explain particular graphemes and their characteristics. The author presents cases where Lamb's notation is inadequate. In those cases, he devises new means for performing the analysis. The result of this…

This book presents an overview of the history of the English language and of English grammars; describes and evaluates traditional grammar, transformational-generative grammar, tagmemic grammar, and stratificational grammar; and proposes sector analysis as a practical way of describing both the structure of English and the native speaker's…

Second and sixth graders were asked to learn noun pairs linked by various types of verbal connectives: Verbs, unmarked and marked comparative adjectives, polar antonym adjective pairs, and conjunctions. Results indicated that all contexts produced better learning than conjunctions, that comparative adjective effects were superior to the polar-pair…

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

Attempts to show that there is no real difference between explicit grammar (structural grammar) and implicit grammar, and that learning a second language's description does not coincide with learning that language. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Suggests the substitution of nonsense words for various parts of speech as a way of enabling children to understand the structural way parts of speech operate. (TO)

Reports a preliminary investigation into the pitch correlates of politeness formulae produced by English and Japanese informants of both sexes. Because of differences in sociosemiotic function of pitch, Japanese females' pitch is more differentiated from the Japanese male pitch than is that of the English female from the English male. (Author/PJM)