Concludes that children were better able to comprehend sentences containing pronouns that functioned as objects in relative clauses, but that in clauses where the pronoun functioned as subject, its presence or absence was not important. (FL)

Two experiments offer clear support for an interactive view of sentence comprehension; semantic factors do interact with syntactic factors. (RL)

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)

The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

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…

In this report data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e. g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson in 1970. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering resulting from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth (1970) will have uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have…

This paper analyzes the order in which subject, verb, and quote come in sentences in the children's stories about Babar by Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff. It suggests that different constructions have different functions that are exploited by the author for communicative purposes. The paper adds that the order in which these elements appear affects…

Indicates that segmenting sentences into meaningful units improves reading comprehension through simplifying the syntax of complex sentences and cueing the reader as to the relationship among intrasentence phrases. (AEA)

A study was conducted to investigate the possibility of improving reading comprehension by training sentence organization skills using a sentence anagram task and word-grouping strategy. Results indicated that training significantly improved sentence anagram performance and transferred to reading comprehension performance. (MKM)

The existence of a "literary dialect" was postulated on several grounds, and specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. (HOD)

Reviews several syntactic studies of children's reading comprehension and suggests teaching methods for promoting sentence comprehension in context. (DD)

Reports on an investigation of the effect of syntax on the comprehension of written English by Thai college students who have studied English as a foreign language. (HOD)