A report on a study in progress of the acquisition of a syntax rule: inversion in questions beginning with "Wh..". Its purpose is to show how certain modifications of linguistic theory and practice can contribute to this study and to psychology of language in general. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Analysis of spoken repetitions of linguistically-controlled sentences by severely and profoundly hearing-impaired 6- to 19-year-olds (N=45) revealed that grammatical category significantly affected articulatory accuracy of target phonemes, while no effects due to syntactic complexity were noted. No differences were seen in performance between age…

Arguing that writing teachers can neither ignore the teaching of grammar nor expect it to succeed if taught in the traditional way, examines the methods, organization, exercises and terminology of the freshman English handbook, identifies problems, and suggests alternatives to helping students satisfactorily edit their papers. (JG)

A language-delayed five-year-old underwent a pragmatic treatment program on topic performance involving the initiation of memory- and future-related topics. Within six months, the child exhibited an increase in such topic initiation and in general level of syntactic development. (Author/CB)

Children's memory for stories was examined as a function of subjects' understanding of causal reasoning ability in stories. Results supported a developmental view in which recall performance was a complex interaction between characteristics of the learner and characteristics of the story. (Author/PCB)

Argues that one way to investigate the relationship of text to story taker (reader or listener) is to compare how the writer has made the story to how the story taker has recreated the story. Indicates a resonance between the story taker's retelling and the original text. (RAE)

Study of Italian business high school students' (N=90) morpheme acquisition order in English-as-a-second-language indicated that present progressive, word order, plural, and negative structures are acquired in early stages, whereas object pronouns, possessive, irregular past, and third person singular present appear much later. (CB)

Suggests that work with the cumulative sentence can have an immediate and profound impact on student writing in the areas of grammar, organization, and specificity. Finds the use of the cumulative sentence helpful as a sentence-combining technique and for several other aspects of composition and grammar. (MS)

To create an environment which motivates students to learn the conventions of formal writing, teachers must teach children the place that these conventions have in language and in linguistic history. Principles that give students a broad picture of language are listed. (JL)

An approach to teaching Nathalie Sarrault's "Tropismes" in second-, third-, and fourth-year French class is outlined. The technique begins with analysis of elements of the tropism, establishing patterns, and requiring students to write a companion tropism to one of the author's. (MSE)

After defining key terms, the article discusses options for the written language assessment of handicapped children in the areas of composition evaluation, and transcription evaluation. Types of evaluating include indirect measures, direct measures, process evaluation, product evaluation, holistic evaluation, and analytic evaluation. (DB)

Reviews literature pertaining to the subtle differences between the meanings of the particles "waw al-ma iyya" and "fa al-sababiyya," emphasizing their construction differences. (CB)

Questions the validity of two assumptions behind the search for the "best" pedagogical (English as a second language) grammar: (1) that there is one ideal pedagogical grammar; and (2) that the success of a pedagogical grammar depends primarily on the linguistic theoretical assumptions incorporated in it. (Author/CB)

Studied was the development of a variety of grammatical-sensitivity and phonological skills in normally achieving, reading-disabled, arithmetic-disabled, and attention deficit disordered children 7 to 14 years old. (PCB)