A description of the pragmatic functions of word order in the Bantu language, Sesotho, and of how children begin to produce them illustrates the developmental trends characterizing Sesotho-speaking children's learning of different word orders. It supports findings from previous language acquisition studies that have indicated that children tend…

Results of tests comparing the ability of children and adults to understand and produce sentences according to type (active, question, passive, negative) and complexity (simple, center-embedding, double-embedding). (Author/FWB)

This investigation was intended to study the effects of some linguistic variables on child and adult memories for sentences when recall was prompted by nouns embedded in the sentences. Its purpose was to examine for developmental differences in sentence processing systems expected by psycholinguistic theory and research. A group of 64 subjects,…

The divisions in transformational grammar into surface and deep structure give rise to the hypothesis that imitative-repetitive drills will never go beyond the surface structure, and that an explicit verbalization of underlying structures will result in better achievement and proficiency in second language learning. The Project described here,…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE INTERSECTION OF THE NONSTANDARD ENGLISH DIALECT OF THE URBAN GHETTOS AND STANDARD ENGLISH. THE AUTHORS DRAW ON SOME PRELIMINARY DATA GATHERED IN PERSONAL INTERVIEWS, INCLUDING A RANDOM SAMPLE OF 100 LOWER- AND MIDDLE-INCOME ADULTS IN THREE AREAS OF SOUTH CENTRAL HARLEM. ALTHOUGH NEGRO SPEECH PATTERNS HAVE BEEN EXPLAINED AS…

The hypothesized ability of adult native speakers to understand linguistic ambiguity was tested. An approach developed to determine linguistic competence tested the ability of 90 participants in individual interviews to interpret sentences having the potential for multiple interpretations. The hypothesis was not supported by the data. A hierarchy…

When Israeli four- to six-year-olds (N=120) wrote pairs of nouns sharing a syllable and sentences sharing either mainly nouns or mainly verbs, analysis indicated that the older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier…