Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

This study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2…

Separating text into meaningful language chunks, as with visual-syntactic text formatting, helps readers to process text more easily and language learners to recognize grammar and syntax patterns more quickly. Evidence of this exists in studies on native and non-native English speakers. However, recent studies question the roll of VSTF in certain…

In a study about the comprehension of anaphoric relationships in text, three anaphoric ties in forward (antecedent-anaphor) and backward (anaphor-antecedent) position were examined with attention to developmental trends. A four-school sample was used, three in the United States and one in New Zealand. A test of comprehension of anaphoric…

Having been taught for one year from a curriculum designed to enhance comprehension of syntactic structures, two groups (experimental and control) of fourth grade students were tested by two special cloze instruments to examine the effect of the curriculum on the comprehension of syntactic structures which the students encountered in reading.…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether: (1) a new basal reading series (N Series) contained a larger variety of sentence patterns in beginning reading materials than a traditional reading series (T Series); (2) the variety of language patterns was systematically increased in beginning reading materials within either series; (3) the T…

The results of this study argue . . . for a gradation within (basal reading) texts of sentence patterns and of elements used to fill the slots in those patterns"; based on author's doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968. (Editor/RD)

Keeping vocabulary and content constant, it was determined whether syntactically more complex structures increase reading difficulty or whether all students, regardless of grade level, have the same syntactic skills and thus read with equal facility materials written at different syntactic maturity levels. One hundred and twenty randomly selected…

An investigation of the relationships between form and comprehension of written materials by eleventh grade students is reported in this paper. Students were asked to manipulate two variables of spacing and punctuation in a consistently administered and marked exercise. Students also completed a comprehension test on the exercise they had just…

Deaf students' recognition of indefinite pronouns and quantifiers was tested using written materials in the form of comic strips. The subjects were 187 profoundly hearing-impaired students, aged 7 to 23 years. Findings showed significant developmental trends for both forms. Quantifiers were found to be significantly more difficult than indefinite…

Reviews research using sentence length as a factor in predicting readability and discusses the possibility of sentence complexity as a more accurate variable. (TO)

Three hypotheses concerning the degree to which understanding of various conjunctions is related to reading comprehension were tested. Four instruments, two standardized tests and two designed for the experiment, were administered to a stratified sample of Mansfield, Ohio, fourth-grade students. The first hypothesis--that there is a significant…

Four researchers discussed their studies of oral reading miscues within a round-table format. After each participant's description of the specific concerns and procedures of his study, the following topics were discussed: description and analysis of the miscue, correction strategy, relationship of the child's language to the language of the…

MUCH OF LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHING IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT WORDS ARE NATURAL UNITS OF LANGUAGE AND THAT PRINTED WORDS HAVE ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCES WITH WORDS IN SPEECH. THE OUTCOME OF THIS ASSUMPTION IS TO EMPHASIZE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD'S SIGHT VOCABULARY AND WORD PERCEPTION, ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO THE TEACHING OF READING.…