This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

THE VERBAL ORGANIZATION RELEVANT TO SERIAL LEARNING WAS STUDIED. NINETY-SIX FOURTH AND FIFTH GRADERS WERE REQUIRED TO LEARN THE ORDER OF ONE LIST OF 14 FAMILIAR NOUNS. THE CONDITIONS OF THE SERIAL TASK WERE PHRASE CONTROL, SENTENCE CONTROL, AND NOUN CONTROL. THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE WAS THE NUMBER OF CORRECT RESPONSES. A REPEATED MEASURES ANALYSIS…

THE RESEARCH REPORTED HERE WAS CARRIED OUT TO EVALUATE THE POSSIBILITY THAT IN THE RECALL OF SIMPLE DECLARATIVE SENTENCES THE SUBJECT-NOUNS ARE EASIER TO RECALL THAN THE OBJECT-NOUNS. SUBJECTS (198 UNDERGRADUATES) WERE EXPOSED TO DECLARATIVE SENTENCES THAT VARIED IN ASSOCIATIVE STRENGTH, SENTENCE TYPE (ACTIVE-PASSIVE), AND THE CLASS OF THE…

A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

Ordering preferences for English adjectives in attributive (prenominal) and predicative (postnominal) positions were found to be in general agreement. Semantically congruent and incongruent adjectives were compared regarding ordering preferences and a "borrowing" theory is proposed. (CHK)

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)

LISTS OF HIGH ASSOCIATION AND LOW ASSOCIATION SENTENCES WERE PREPARED FROM CONTROLLED ASSOCIATION NORMS. AN INTRA-LIST INTERFERENCE CONDITION WAS CREATED FOR HIGH ASSOCIATION SENTENCES BY PAIRING THE NOUN PHRASE OF ONE SENTENCE WITH THE VERB PHRASE OF ANOTHER SENTENCE IN THE SAME LIST. A SIMILAR PROCEDURE WAS FOLLOWED WITH THE LOW ASSOCIATION…

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

Subjects read sets of active or passive sentences, and an active or passive question was asked about one. Errors were compared. Results suggest that surface form of a single sentence is retained; surface and deep structures are retained for two, and only deep structures of four and eight sentences. (CHK)

The study analyzed some of the problems of measuring intelligence and verbal learning ability among Mexican-American preschoolers. (Author)

Three experiments test the relationship between implicit speech and comprehension processes for meaningful material. (Author/AM)