The present experiment with retarded and normal readers was designed to test comprehension across major segmental boundaries, an aspect of syntax raised by generative grammars, and to relate the comprehension problem to other correlates of reading retardation by choosing a problem in which ordering strategies may be adopted. (Author/KC)

In order to discern whether sixth grade students with differing levels of reading achievement (as measured by the Paragraph Meaning subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test) also differed in the level of syntactic maturity evidenced in their response to a sentence combining task, a syntactic structure inventory of eight sentence-combining stimulus…

The function of syntax as a factor in comprehension is described in terms of transformations of basic sentence patterns. Examples of transformations of the basic indirect object sentence are included to show emphasis, questions, negations, and coordinate or subordinate relationships. The term grammeme is defined as the minimum unit of syntactical…

Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar, or more specifically his theory of syntax, proposes to describe all possible English sentences through an explanation of how the native speaker generates sentences. It is the study of one's competence that offers insights into how language is acquired and how the rules and generalizations of that language are…

Research funded by a contract from the U.S. Office of Education to Rutgers University. (DS)

The attempt to teach deep structure recovery skills to poor readers was unsuccessful, perhaps because of student attitudes. (JH)

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

Two contrasting theories of reading are reviewed in light of recent research in psycholinguistics. A strictly "visual" model of fluent reading is contrasted with several mediational theories where auditory or articulatory coding is deemed necessary for comprehension. Surveying the research in visual information processing, oral reading,…

Sentence patterns are often crucial to the degree of understanding a child derives from the printed page, and if he is to fully understand what he reads, he must be able to analyze the written language patterns in which the information is conveyed. This study analyzed selected passages from three grade 4 basal reader series to determine which…

A study of children's syntax from a transformational perspective was initiated to explore the following areas: syntactic differences between narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative writing, and the relation of these differences to IQ, sex, and reading comprehension; the relation of syntax content; and the relation of children's…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: a transformational analysis of syntax in tenth-grade writing; the relationship between inner-city fifth graders' reading comprehension and writing achievement; the relationship of the…