Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform…

Describes a study which found that generative rhetoric instruction produced a quantitative and qualitative increase in college students' syntactic maturity. (DD)

The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

Sensitivity to syntactic structure can be increased by direct instruction. (JH)

Designed to test the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text, this instrument was applied to 34 subjects who were asked to write 1,000 words of prose…

This study sought to broaden the scope of teacher training in English by incorporating an experimental design in practice teaching. The control group, 20 ninth graders whose IQ's averaged 95, studied narrative-descriptive writing and transformational grammar, writing the same number of compositions as the two experimental groups. The low…

The relevance to elementary foreign language instruction of certain findings of child language development (native language) and the psychology of language acquisition is examined. A set of premises is proposed for a new scheme for the teaching of German based on these findings, namely, that comprehension precedes production, that language…