Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform…

The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

This study reflects the author's efforts to synthesize ideas drawn from various linguistic theorists, especially Schlesinger, Chomsky, and Fillmore. The first section gives the theoretical background for the study. The second section discusses roles, relations, and constructs. The final section discusses the applications of the study to teaching…

The beginning reading progress of children may be linked to sentence structures used in reading textbooks and the syntax of the child's oral language. An investigation was made of the preprimers and primers of three major publishing companies and of Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (SWRL) reading programs to…

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

An attempt to predict reading difficulty with various grammatical measures showed that the relatively crude measure of sentence length is still the most indicative. Yngve's phrase structure measurement and Allen's "sector analysis" were used on 80 selected passages and were compared to the Lorge Readability Formula in terms of tests based on the…

Procedures and findings of three reading comprehension studies are reported. The first study compared cloze readability test scores for 130 pairs of students (grade 3 through college) with scores indicating the information gained from reading. Students gained little or no information when they could not answer more than 25 percent of the cloze…

The aim of this study is to supply the Russian language teacher with information about the patterns most frequently and consistently occurring in common speech. It begins with a discussion of normative grammar and linguistic reality, colloquial language, the sentence, sentence length, short expressions, and generative grammar. Sentences used in…

This introductory text in Punjabi (also spelled Panjabi) is intended primarily for those whose mother tongue is not Punjabi but are native speakers of other Indian languages. Some familiarity with the Punjabi cultural items is presupposed. The non-Indian may, however, also be able to use this text with profit since the lessons are graded. The…

This paper, one in a series investigating day care services, is based on two assumptions concerning verbalizations of preschool children: (1) the complexity of verbalizations is more important than the quantity; and (2) the quality of care is directly related to the occurrence of the complexity of verbalizations. The higher the occurrence of…

The purpose of this study were to survey scientific research, professional literature, and doctoral dissertations on reading comprehension done from 1948 to 1972, to identify the reading factors believed to affect reading comprehension, to analyze the identified reading factors by studying the major available research and related literature, to…

Designed to measure comprehension of intact and deleted sentence structures corresponding to selected deletion transformation rules, this test is intended to be used with primary age children. Eight test passages were constructed at each of the first reader and high second reader levels from stories in the Ginn Basic Reader so that each passage…

Current linguistic theories, such as interpretive and generative semantics, are judged theoretically unsound and practically unsuitable for pedagogical purposes. Although the concept of case must be included in a grammar, current case theories are also rejected. The concept of case is redefined, as are the defining criteria for each case. A noun…

The effect of sentence length and syntactic structure on the repeatability of sentences by native and foreign speakers of English was investigated in this study using 18 native English speakers, 30 advanced foreign students, and 114 intermediate level foreign students. Eighty-four sentences were presented for repetition, varying according to word…

This study examines the effect of expectation (children's judgments as to the probable actor within a given sentence) upon comprehension of passive sentences, the relationship of syntactic comprehension to the paradigmatic-syntagmatic shift in word associations, and the effect of sex on each. Forty first-graders and 40 kindergarteners were blocked…