This study investigated the possibility of training or improving intrasentence organizational skills (i.e., those that enable the reader to encode and process verbal information in higher-order units) and explored the effects that training had on reading comprehension. The subjects were 31 third graders, 16 experimental students and 15 control…

Stella Center's belief in the basic importance of grammatical structure as a factor in reading comprehension substantiated the author's theory that the ability to comprehend syntactic structure is positively correlated with the ability to comprehend meaning. Original instruments devised to test this hypothesis included a test which utilized…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

The paper constitutes an attempt to provide a nonenumerative characterization of agreeing terms and agreement features. The following pertinent statements turn out to be (near) exceptionless: only coreferential terms agree, and for any given language all agreement features are pronominal ones. Four agreement features, gender, number, definiteness,…

Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an…

Assuming that hypothesized concepts of "case" and "semantic deep structure" reveal insights into the irregularities of cognitive semantic structures underlying the English language, this study attempted to probe the semantic structure of English to provide a foundation for language curriculum materials. Using the case grammar of Charles J.…

In an attempt to improve students' written expression, this study tested two assumptions: (1) that if students were led through a series of oral language experiences to a realization of the relationships between oral and written sentence structures which they were encouraged to practice, they would write a variety of sentence structures; and (2)…

In answer to the need for more effective punctuation instruction, a project, based on the theory that an essential relationship exists between intonation and punctuation, was designed for and executed with two 9th-grade student groups--one experimental, the other control. The experimental group received punctuation instruction through the use of…

Differences between the English and Ukrainian verbal forms, meaning, and usage are studied in this booklet. While the author illustrates significant distinctions in basic forms, sentences, and in paragraph structure, he concludes that the most important differences between both systems are of a psychological nature. Examples are cited, often using…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

A linguistic analysis of five children's books, randomly selected from the "Modern Masters Books for Children" series, described the features of language found in books for beginning readers and demonstrated the value of structural analysis in reading research. Four linguistic measures were applied to each book: 1) the average number of words in a…

This investigation was concerned with five questions: (1) To what degree to children in grade 5 use the same words in speaking and writing? (2) Do they use similar sentence structure in speaking and writing? (3) Do they maintain the same quality of expression in speaking and writing? (4) Is there a difference in the language performance of boys…