Investigated two methods of segmenting text based upon phrase boundaries in an attempt to make social studies textbooks more readable for elementary school students. Concludes that phrasing the passages for students improved their reading comprehension by approximately one grade level. (FL)

Illustrates variation affecting the position of pronouns in complex verb phrases among native French speakers. Describes the methods used to verify the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between individual hesitation and lack of consensus in the community. Analyzes data from questionnaires administered to 551 persons in Switzerland and…

Examines, within the framework of contrastive rhetoric, nominal clauses and predicates, arguing that there are essential differences in nominalization between English and Japanese, such as focusing on the event in Japanese and on the individual in English. The article emphasizes the diverse ways in which languages are endowed to express different…

Presents data from 4 Inuit children ages 2;0 to 3;6 that shows relatively early acquisition of both simple and complex forms of the passive. Within this age range, children are productively producing truncated, full, action, and experiential passive. Reasons for this precociousness, including adult input and language structure, are explored. (56…

Argues that "information structure management" is an important and problematic part of the competence sought by nonnative speakers, particularly for goal-related discourse types where clarity and argumentative power play a role. Simulated negotiation material is used to demonstrate how certain nonnative structures hamper the…

Examined the development of Irish word order patterns. It was found that the 1.5- to 3-year-olds (N=3) studied used subject-initial utterances more frequently than adults in input, and that for both adults and children the elision of the verb "to be" had a significant role in the placement of subjects in the utterances. (42 references)…

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Argues for the use of computer-stored corpora in courses in grammar awareness for teachers of mother-tongue English. It is suggested that the ability to do grammar entails a set of skills rather than a body of knowledge and that corpora provide excellent data for doing grammar. Questions regarding the comparison of different methodologies are…

Observation and comparison of native speaking and English-as-a-Second-Language students' reading patterns, overall reading comprehension, and comprehension of coreferential pronouns revealed that misunderstanding of coreferential ties reflected a misunderstanding of the descriptive phrases to which the pronouns referred. (22 references) (Author/CB)

This investigation encompassed a full-scale experiment for both Japanese and Korean university students and looked at the following: the role of grammaticality-judgment tasks (GJT) in second-language acquisition; the learners' behaviors when they were asked to do GJT; and the reasons why the learners made the wrong grammatical judgments.…

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost…

After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are…

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…

We recorded participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing verb-phrase coordination. Results showed evidence of immediate processing disruption when a reflexive pronoun embedded in the conjoined verb phrase mismatched the sentence subject. We argue that this result is incompatible with models of human parsing that employ only…

Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with…