These papers were written as supporting documents for a colloquium on the Vietnamese language. The first catalogues and analyzes Vietnamese vowels, diphthongs, consonants and tones. The second analyzes some facets of Vietnamese syntax. (CHK)

Raises doubts about the validity of readability formulas. (RB)

In this article, syntactic evidence is presented to show that the two functions of place adverbials in Chinese cannot be reduced to one, and that both functions must be considered as semantic primes in the semantic structure of Chinese. (CLK)

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

Investigates the relationship between memory for prose and the structural characteristics of the semantic representation proposed by Kintsch. Results extend the generality of Kintsch's model across a wide range of ages, and indicate that a proposition is more likely to be recalled when its superordinate is also recalled. (EJS)

Basal readers are supposed to be easy for children to read, but sometimes their language is so unnatural that it's more confusing than helpful. (MKM)

Examines the nature of thematization and thematic progression in children's narrative styles, in order to draw some conclusions regarding the acquisition of textual skills. (AM)

Discusses the problem of the lack of native speakers to judge grammatical acceptability in analyzing a dead language such as Latin, and proposes an analysis on the level of linguistic performance. (AM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

Shows how subjects' varying levels of academic achievement influenced their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of simple sentences, suggesting that differing levels of deep structure accompany differing levels of education. (RL)

Finds developmental differences in the abilities of eight-year-old, eleven-year-old, and adult second language learners to repeat certain grammatical sentence structures. (RL)

A brief typological sketch of Wappo syntax is presented as well as a detailed presentation of one particular typological characteristic, "subjecthood." An explanation for the unusual surface coding of subjects in Wappo is given. (Author/NCR)

Describes a study using transformational generative grammar to demonstrate that the frequently used structure "verb a verb" in Spanish is to be interpreted in three ways. Conclusions are drawn for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. (AMH)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)