Outlines a way of conceiving the area of language identified by case or grammatical relation that does not rely on the specification of universal inventory. The alternative proposes the existence of principles of intelligence, which in their operation in language, yield the language performance that is interpreted as ROLES. (Contains 80…

Provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the CECIL computer hardware and software package to analyze 28 right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse. It was found that, although right-dislocations appear to fulfill various functional roles in discourse, no correlation appears…

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

This study of 213 high school and 211 postsecondary students with deafness found that limited syntactic competence may limit a reader's ability to apply vocabulary skills for reading comprehension. Repeated Reading is described as a promising strategy for developing syntactic competence. (JDD)

Analyzes Scientific English for nonnative speakers, in particular Italians, and points out the principal areas of difficulty. (CFM)

Summarizes some of the syntactic differences between English and Japanese in such areas as word order, wh-movement, subject-auxiliary inversion, expletives, multiple subject constructions, scrambling, and modifiable pro-forms in Japanese. (26 references) (CB)

Data from a longitudinal study matching language-disordered and linguistically normal children are used to assess reading development from grade one to grade four. It is shown that good comprehenders use meaningful units more frequently than do poor comprehenders, that their reading errors are more often negligible, and that they violate syntactic…

Ways in which the notion of causation is expressed in written British English are examined in a study that collected 130 different expressive devices. The use of causative conjunctions was found to be the most frequent of eight major ways of marking causation, closely followed by causative adverbs. (21 references) (Author/LB)

Texts in Classical Nahuatl from 1524, in the genre of formal oratory, reveal extensive use of lines showing parallel morphosyntactic and semantic structure. Analysis and translation of a passage point to the applicability of structural analysis to "expressive" as well as "referential" texts; and the importance of understanding…

Verb agreement in the K'iche' agentive voice appears to deviate from the ergative/absolutive system of other Mayan languages, leading some to treat agreement in the agentive as falling outside the regular agreement system as well as to differing views regarding appropriate syntactic representation of the agentive construction with respect to final…

The FG syndrome is characterized by unusual facies; sudden infant death; developmental delay; and abnormalities of the cardiac, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems. Serial evaluations of one case with isolated agenesis of the corpus callosum found consistent patterns over time in specific language impairments in syntactic and…

Investigates semantic and contextual similarity for pairs of nouns that vary from high to low semantic similarity. An inverse relationship between similarity of meaning and the discriminability of contexts is demonstrated. It is concluded that the more often two words can be substituted, the more similar in meaning they are judged to be. (33…

The studies presented here represent an attempt to determine which of several alterations to the input directed to second-language learners affect comprehensibility. The first study manipulated both speed and syntax, and the second study examined the introduction of pauses into the input. (JL)

This study examining whether certain textbooks emphasize a semantic presentation of their contents arose from the results of a previous study conducted by the authors. It was hypothesized that certain textbooks would organize their contents by comparing and contrasting symptoms, signs, and disorders rather than simply listing them. (MLW)

This study of six adolescents with brain injuries, and six controls, investigated the influence of working memory load on performance of a task designed to measure receptive syntax ability. The performance of the adolescents with brain injuries was significantly worse than that of controls. (Author/CR)