Developed by the Oregon Elementary English Project, this curriculum unit on language games and activities is intended for grades one and two. The games and activities are designed to make the child aware of language indirectly by requiring him to construct sentences of various kinds, observe relations between parts of sentences and between words,…

The effect on student writing of Communications I classes at the University of Northern Colorado was tested using 95 students studying under 5 different teachers and 15 students who had participated in a previous study. Two paragraphs, one written at the beginning of the term and one at the end of the term were rated for organization, development,…

A heuristic strategy model of sentence comprehension, similar to ones suggested by Bever, Fodor and Garret, is discussed, with the focus on the conceptual characteristics of such a model and on relevant research. Briefly, the model assumes that a speech perception device constructs a representation of a heard sentence corresponding roughly to a…

Reported was a two part study of 59 educable mentally retarded (EMR) primary grade children which examined the possibility of ascertaining continuous word-association norms, word-association norms, and sentence norms for EMR children, and of utilizing the high word and sentence associations to facilitate reading instruction. Collection of both…

Patterns and possibilities of free modifiers in written composition were studied. One purpose of the investigation was to help students communicate more effectively in writing. A more specific purpose was to determine if complicated syntactic elements used as free modifiers could be lifted from the complex subject of grammar and be presented as…

Thirty third graders, divided into three equal groups, were used to determine the extent to which good, average, and poor readers depend upon two types of reading cues--graphic features of word and of context. To hold error quantity differences constant, materials were chosen at different levels of vocabulary and syntactic difficulty. Each subject…

Three studies were conducted concerning the skills of deaf postsecondary students in recognizing and manipulating linguistic structures in written language. The first study was a pilot study dealing with the deaf student's ability to identify structural units in written language. The second two studies, concerning the cloze procedure, examined the…

The purposes of this research were to develop a new methodology for measuring comprehension and analyze individual differences in perceiving sentence difficulty. Written descriptions of commonly occurring visual scenes served as the stimuli in the new methodology. The reader's success in drawing a scene after viewing a written description of it…

This study attempted to validate both the Fry-Kernel Distance Theory and the De Pierro findings, in determining the suitability of text material for the students to be instructed. First-year community college students were presented with sentences arranged in pairs, each representing two of four prescribed types. Subjects were to select the harder…

Textual puzzles may be used in freshman composition or introduction to writing courses to emphasize word order and subject-predicate agreement. These sentence puzzles demonstrate that the English language depends primarily upon word order to convey meaning, and assist students to avoid blending statement and question word order in their sentences…

Describes an experimental computer-assisted history tutoring system that uses augmented transitional networks to allow computer interaction in natural language. (IRT)

Describes a program for understanding and generating natural language which handles paragraph-length imput. Its core, "preference semantics," a system of preferential choice between deep semantic patterns, is contrasted with: (1) syntax-oriented linguistic approaches, and (2) theorem-proving approaches to understanding. Available from…

This article discusses the notion of the scope of quantifiers in natural language. Previous studies are reviewed, and three factors essential to understanding scope are isolated: inherent characteristics of the quantifier, its grammatical function in a sentence, and serial distribution of predominance. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

In two experiments, subjects were interrupted while listening to a two-clause sentence just before the last word of either the initial clause or the final clause. The two experiments together suggest that interclause semantic relations affect the immediate processing of clauses. (Author/EJS)