A study of 65 seventh grade students indicates that existing readability formulas should be used in combination with measures of syntactic complexity to assess levels of passage difficulty for students who appear to have difficulty in reading comprehension. (JD)

Compares the use of sentence weight and the T-unit in measuring the oral language of 32 adolescents. Indicates the relative merits of the T-unit as a measure of oral language, because the two measures appeared to give much the same information about the speech samples examined. (RL)

Describes a module used to teach ESL students to distinguish phrases from clauses and sentences from nonsentences or fragments, thus enabling them to edit the errors of punctuation out of their writing. A chart of four grammatical units in a hierarchy (single words, groups of words, clauses, and sentences) is included. (Author/PJM)

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)

Reports on research designed to determine the development in comprehension of selected pronoun-referent structures. Some of the conclusions were that noun phrase pronominal structures were easier to comprehend than sentential pronominals and that structures with forward reference were easier to comprehend than those with backward reference. (MKM)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

Examines "Head Movement" in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). The article shows that in some cases, head movement to an external position need not take place and demonstrates that this movement of the head to a sentence-internal position results from the quantificational nature of IHRCs and Diesing's mapping hypothesis (1990,…

Examines word order in French relative clauses, the last clauses to undergo reanalysis to [SVO] word order through Old and Middle French. Analysis shows that although main clauses change from [SVO] to [TVX] to [SVO] in a progressive manner, clauses in "que" show a preference for [TVX] order until the 13th century, with a resurgence in…

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the…

Using Korean, we investigated how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influence the representation of a sentence, in particular, the relative accessibility of different components of a sentence representation. In six experiments, participants performed a probe recognition task after reading each of a series of sentences. We manipulated the…

An often-noted contrast between child and adult language is that young children produce sentences both with and without lexical subjects even if subjects are obligatory in the adult system. However, in Dutch, there is no such structural difference between the earliest stages of Dutch child grammar and the adult stage where subjects are concerned.…

An investigation of two sentence types in English and Spanish contrasts the syntactic features of each and examines the implications for second language instruction. Existential-presentative (ex-pr) and non-existential-presentative (pr) sentences are seen as an important tool for communication because they introduce an element that is…

The verb in Classical Aztec is slowly moving from the end of the sentence to the beginning due to the attraction of sentence initial modal particles to the verb. Not only the function but also the position of elements should be examined to account for word-order change. (SCC)

In Spanish non-sentence constructions, beginning elements establish a datum of reference, while following elements narrow the possibilities of syntagmatic combination. Word order is examined in relation to paradigm contrast and syntagmatic complexity. (CK)