Examines the abilities of 50 children (10 each at ages 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14 years) to produce tag questions. Of particular interest was the determination of whether or not constituents of a correct tag are acquired at different ages. (MP)

This study was made to discern the relationship between an adult subject's cognitive level of development and the complexity of the syntactic structure of the language she uses. (Author/JD)

Details findings indicating that most early linguistic competence is item based. Maintains that language development proceeds without evidence of system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. Suggests that findings are not easily explained by the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other external…

In this article we report on an 8-year process that included three successive iterations of the following cycle: (a) development of instructional technology, (b) formative evaluation, and (c) modification of the technology. From the first formative evaluation to the last, our students told us that they found heavily contextualized language…

The interpretation of nonlexicalized compound words in English by speakers of English as a second language (ESL) was investigated. Three types of competence used in interpreting noun compounds are identified: pragmatic, linguistic, and textual. The use of these three types of competence by Hebrew speaking college students enrolled in ESL reading…

Three experiments on the comprehension and acquisition of temporal terms are described. Methodological innovations were applied to control for possible methodological effects on children's performance. Each experiment involved 24 children aged 3 to 5. In the first experiment, subjects manipulated toys in response to instructions containing the…

An experiment was undertaken with young children to look at the relative contribution of discourse constraints, subject anaphors, and the semantics of verbs to the integration of an utterance into its discourse representation. Children aged 5, 7, and 10 years heard a series of short stories, each consisting of three sentences and an incomplete…

Defines black dialect and traces its history; explores the myths of the linguistically underdeveloped black child; discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of black dialect and its relation to teaching black children to read; summarizes some of the implications for teacher attitudes and our educational system as a whole. (EH)

The relationship between linguistic awareness (assessed by the Surface Structure Utilization Test and Word Usage Recovery Test) and reading comprehension (assessed by a fifth-word deletion cloze test and by the Metropolitan Reading Subtest Form F, 1970) was examined among 153 fourth graders, 174 sixth graders, and 132 eighth graders. The…

Two tasks were used to choose between two rival accounts--cognitive vs. pragmatic--of children's failure to comprehend metaphors. A total of 120 children, in three age groups (6, 7, and 9 years) were given either an explication or a multiple choice task to assess comprehension of 15 novel comparisons expressed in five alternative forms varying in…

The scientific study of translation, translatology, is behind linguistics in the study of data. While linguistics has reached out to include all speech acts within its proper study, the data of translatology remain, almost exclusively, professionally authored texts. The proper study of translatology is all translation. Everyday speech should not…

Forty Swedish university students produced sentences from homographs that could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of polysemy (multiple meaning). The results indicated that the subjects prefered verb productions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the…

From an outline of the recent history of the psychology of language the author proceeds to discuss research that has been done recently in psycholinguistics. These studies fall within the following areas: (1) "The Study of Grammar as a Psychological Process," (2) "How We Remember Sentences," (3) "What We Do When We…

As part of a long range study of language behavior, six teenage mentally retarded males (IQ 37 to 64) were interviewed, and tapes were made to record language samples. Linguistic competence was found to be adequate while language performance was deficient. The sentence repetition test was found to be a useful predictor of problem areas for high…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…