Syntactic language features of word problems have often been identified by assessment studies and interview studies as potential obstacles in word problem solving. However, students' processes of noticing and interpreting these features have only rarely been investigated in depth because noticing is hard to investigate. Eye-tracking methodology…

Analysis of the deep structure of certain Tagalog sentences reveals buried agents. In Tagalog, verbs are inflected for the case role of the subject Noun Phrase (NP). However, Tagalog contains many sentences which, on the surface, do not appear to adhere to this rule, because they are missing the agent. Among sentences which deviate from the rule…

Minor grammatical errors made by German students in translating from English to German led to an investigation of the means available in the two languages for effecting text-coherence. The examples cited indicate that English has fewer possibilities than German for showing sentence perspective through surface-syntactical markers. (IFS/WGA)

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Arguments for the introduction of an adverbial node label (ADV) in transformational grammar are examined and rejected. The following question is raised: Is a node label ADV necessary, or can the phenomena associated with adverbials be explained in terms of the set of node labels used to explain other areas of grammar? The author argues that a new…

Describes an experiment designed to determine the effect of missing syntactic cues on listeners' comprehension of grammatical sentences heard through noise. Comparison between sentences containing function word deletions and sentences with a more clearly displayed syntactic structure suggests that deletion of minor cues hinders comprehension under…

This study, part of an on-going investigation, analyzes the syntactic aspects of code-switching. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that there are only two general linguistic constraints where code-switching may occur, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. This study describes in formal terms how the two constraints…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

The tenth volume in this series contains five articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "The Infinitive as Subject in English and Serbo-Croatian," by Ljiljana Bibovic; "The Contrastive Analysis of Collocations: Collocational Ranges of "Make" and "Take" with…

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

An analytic sketch of motion/location in more primitive spatio-temporal terms is presented. The earlier account (ED 096 825), showing various languages' most characteristic pattern for deriving a putatively-universal underlying representation of motion and location, is continued. The English pattern is characterized further (amplified by data from…

Examines from a creolist perspective the claim that American Sign Language (ASL) has creole origins. Applying criteria based on the work of various creole researchers, the article concludes that the evidence for creole origins of ASL does not meet any usual definition of a creole. The article discusses lexical and morhosyntactic similarities…