Discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent. Cites a study comparing the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers; concludes that syntactic maturity correlates with writing quality and that teachers should begin instruction by emphasizing syntactic skills. (RL)

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

The effects of speech rate, intonation, and sentence length on children's ability to imitate sentences were examined. Results indicate that adult speech is more readily imitated by children when intonation is normal, sentences are short, and speech rate is close to that of the child. (Author/AM)

An experiment investigated the retrieval processes involving a noun with an adjective. Results suggest that a noun's meaning is retrieved in conjunction with an adjective when the phrase describes a familiar concept. (Author/AM)

Token reinforcement and remedial feedback were made contingent upon writing correct sentences containing prenominal adjectives only, then adverbs only, then prenominal adjectives plus adverbs. When the instructional package was implemented, all Ss demonstrated significant increases in response rate, accuracy, and percentage of correct sentences,…

Discusses the problems of Japanese students learning to read German; their two years of German at the university are inadequate. A "profile" of minimum reading competence is presented, followed by suggestions for teaching, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and types of text exercises. (IFS/WGA)

Suggests using a sentence construction game to make basic writing students more aware of their linguistic ability and more comfortable dealing with grammar. Indicates that the experience helps students in revising their writing and introduces the experience of working creatively and playfully with language. (TJ)

Seeks to determine whether young children use different strategies than do adults in clausal processing. Subjects were 20 three year olds, 30 four year olds, 20 five year olds, and 30 undergraduate students. (MP)

Elaborates on and updates the article "Derived Noun Phrases in Spanish Containing Locatives" by John P. Wonder and Alberto Eraso Guerrero (1976). Gives a detailed description of the uses of "ser" and "haber" in the locative expression. (NCR)

Significant differences were observed between sentence length used by children in speaking and the length of sentences in primers and first reader textbooks. (JD)

Suggests an instructional technique called sentence building as a means of developing the ability to write more complex sentences and to read more complex sentences with understanding. (MKM)

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)

Considers ways to diagnose and group ESL (English as a Second Language) students for writing instruction that is based on sentence combining. Suggests available materials to use with this technique, and offers specific examples of the use of sentence combining to generate prenominal adjectives and relative clauses. (RL)

Reports on research into the use of the particle "-le" by native speakers of Chinese. (AM)

In order to test the hypothesis that the ability to form verbal concepts would increase with age, a test for verbal concept formation was developed and administered to 668 children between the ages of 4 and 9. By varying sentences that describe nonsense figures, 4 variables were systematically explored. (MS)