Describes experiments involving responses of language disordered children to sentences that can carry directive import. Results indicate that language disordered children are qualitatively like normal children with regard to early response behavior. These children do have more difficulty in generating informing responses and utilizing information…

Measures of syntactic knowledge and reading achievement were obtained for 41 students in an adult basic education center. Adults reading at or below fourth-grade level showed significantly less knowledge of syntax than adults at higher levels, even though the language test involved neither reading nor writing. (Author/CT)

Surveys the main results obtained in a study of syntactic ambiguities in English, and discusses their most important implications for general and applied linguistics. Concludes that awareness of the linguistic treatments of ambiguity can be of great help to the teacher in developing students' competence. (MES)

Ways to use personal computers to simplify the task of identifying and describing the phonology, morphology, and syntax of a language are outlined. The actual programing is viewed as simple once a phonetic alphabet is defined and symbols to indicate parts of speech are chosen. (MP)

Reviews studies that have investigated the relationship between reading comprehension and the frequency of occurrence of syntactic structures in children's oral language. Shows that children have difficulty comprehending written materials that contain unfamiliar syntactic structures. Discusses the instructional implications of the findings.…

Divides Taiwanese modals into: (1) authority, where a deep structure agent exercises authority; (2) contigency, which concerns the speaker's judgment of the possibility or logical necessity df the occurrence of an event; and (3) volition, which expresses the subject's desires. The constructions in which these modals appear are examined. (PJM)

For spot-dictation purposes, song lyrics can be duplicated with blanks for the words or structures that are desirable to emphasize. Lyrics quite often have repetitious structures and vocabulary, and lend themselves to reinforcing new forms or concepts. This procedure can encourage general listening comprehension while highlighting one particular…

Examines the structure of negation in questions in French, in particular the interrogative form containing a negative but expecting a positive response. (AM)

Reports on research that sought to clarify Brown's (1973) research on acquisition order, syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, and the relationship among the three. (Author/AM)

Proposes a metatheoretical basis for an epistemology of linguistics. (AM)

Reports on a study which explored the intonational differences between constant plus variable utterances and variable plus variable utterances, and which sought to use intonation to resolve the lexical additive vs syntactic representation of beginning productions. (AM)

Presents a critique of John Knowles' (1975) analysis of Spanish impersonal "se." (AM)

Sixty learning disabled children and 60 children in regular classes (both groups' ages six to nine years) were given a tense marker test to elicit future, present, and past tense markers for 50 verbs organized into ten categories based on the operation required to form the past tense. (Author/PHR)

Discusses recent analyses of the adjective in Italian and stresses the importance of the position of the Italian adjective for second language learners of Italian and for Italians learning foreign languages. (CFM)

Presents a novel approach, relying on linguistic principles of semantics, to teach grammatical usage in Spanish as a second language. (AM)