Describes the longitudinal emergence of verb inflections as observed in the speech of four American English-speaking children emphasizing occurrence of inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and their conditional use. Discusses results in terms of sentence relations between verbs and other constituents and the semantics of verb…

It is argued that informed judgments by a thoughtful teacher may have advantages over the application of a readability formula in assessing the linguistic difficulty of a text. Examples are given. (KC)

A study of 65 seventh grade students indicates that existing readability formulas should be used in combination with measures of syntactic complexity to assess levels of passage difficulty for students who appear to have difficulty in reading comprehension. (JD)

Compares the use of sentence weight and the T-unit in measuring the oral language of 32 adolescents. Indicates the relative merits of the T-unit as a measure of oral language, because the two measures appeared to give much the same information about the speech samples examined. (RL)

Describes a module used to teach ESL students to distinguish phrases from clauses and sentences from nonsentences or fragments, thus enabling them to edit the errors of punctuation out of their writing. A chart of four grammatical units in a hierarchy (single words, groups of words, clauses, and sentences) is included. (Author/PJM)

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases, using a phrase classification task. Results support a lexical representation hypothesis for the processing of idioms. (Author/AM)

A study used two-dimensional recall to identify the units of recall in the process of remembering, in order to investigate the correspondence of experimentally identified memory units to theoretically defined propositional units, and the correspondence of recall organization to story schema. (Author/AM)

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)

Reports on research designed to determine the development in comprehension of selected pronoun-referent structures. Some of the conclusions were that noun phrase pronominal structures were easier to comprehend than sentential pronominals and that structures with forward reference were easier to comprehend than those with backward reference. (MKM)

Children aged six and eight were required to recall transitive sentences, some with an animate actor and inanimate acted-upon element, and some with these reversed. It appeared that children prefer to put the animate noun first and this affects their choice of active or passive sentence voice. (Author/SJL)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

Investigates the age effects on the abilities of older and younger adults in Canada to use contextual information to resolve ambiguous pronouns. Findings reveal that both groups were equally influenced by the contextual information available, although older adults responded more slowly and were less accurate than the younger adults. (50…

Investigates the relationships between the process of encoding and the resulting comprehension and representation of second-language (L2) sentences that are causally related. Results suggest that integration and elaboration had a critical effect on L2 readers' comprehension and memory of the sentences. (37 references) (Author/CK)