This study examined the factors influencing the choice of the conjunctions "and" or "but" in joining two clauses of a compound sentence. Subjects were students at first-, fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade and adult levels. (Author/ED)

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

Describes techniques for measuring and developing the syntactic fluency of students learning French. (P M P)

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

The materials in this course are designed to be taught by an instructor who speaks Yoruba as her/his first language and, in addition, has a good knowledge of English. The mimicry, manipulation, and memorization phase consists of three parallel columns: Column A lists the lexical items to be introduced, Column B gives the pronunciation of some…

Teachers are often baffled by the inability of a number of basic writing students to use the proper connective to show relationship between sentences or phrases for coherence. Most frustrating is the teacher's inadequacy in giving definitions or explanations beyond the student's textbook descriptions of the connectives. However, a cursory…

A reaction-time experiment measured the time that subjects needed to read and comprehend a series of sentences, the syntactic form of which was systematically varied. The focus was on the effect of syntactic structure on processing time, reflected in reaction time in a neutral context, and the effect of prior context on time needed to process a…

Writing samples from 20 college students were examined for the quantitative and qualitative changes that occurred between their freshman and junior years. The writing samples were analyzed quantitatively for mean length of T-unit and subordinate clauses per T-unit and holistically for focus, organization, development, and coherence. These analyses…

Two studies were conducted to test Francis Christensen's theory of generative rhetoric, which maintains that students should be taught the types of sentences that they infrequently use, especially ones with nonrestrictive phrasal modifiers (participial phrases and appositives) as a way to approach invention. The first study examined the principles…

A study analyzed the cohesive elements found within a text and the difficulty of their resolution within a particular text structure. The specific cohesive form used was pronominal reference. Each of forty-four students in grades ten through twelve was asked to read, sentence by sentence, a text which contained pronouns and pronoun referents. They…

The influence of five programs of the Mt. Druitt Early Childhood Project on the development of preschool children's vocabulary and syntactical skills was assessed in a pretest/posttest design. Programs differed in the amount of structure they imposed on the language experiences of the children and in the content they specified. Different measures…

The study involving 12 learning disabled (LD) junior high school students investigated whether LD students with reading comprehension difficulties were deficient in syntactic abilities as compared to normal students. Syntactic and reading tests were administered to each student. Comparison of the scores between the two groups showed that LD Ss…

Predictors of relative clause production in adult second language acquisition were examined through a replication and extension of a study by Schachter (1974). The present study is different in that it was based on oral instead of written production and it was designed to examine avoidance with the consideration that avoidance presupposed choice.…

Language training for the non-verbal or language delayed child should utilize feedback to reinforce correct responses and should closely follow the syntactical development of normal children. The two basic areas of language training are receptive and expressive. Receptive language training includes attending and responding, following single phase…