No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

An analysis of indirect object passives in English and their development from Late Old English and Early Middle English suggests that their existence is related to the development of double object constructions. As long as the dative and accusative cases had not merged, neither pronominal nor nominal indirect objects required a preposition;…

This study reports the use of automated textual analysis on a French novel. An introductory section chronicles the history of artificial intelligence, focusing on its use with natural languages, and discusses its application to textual syntax. The first chapter examines computational linguistics in greater detail, looking at its relationship to…

Some of the problems inherent in a word-based hypothesis asserting that the word/stem is taken as the minimal sign not only for syntax but also for morphology are examined in an analysis of a polysynthetic language, Koyukon, an Athabaskan language of Alaska. Data from the Central dialect is considered in the analysis. A brief sketch of the verbal…

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

A computer-based method of communicating syntactic knowledge to deaf students was designed, building on the visual orientation of deaf students and employing such American Sign Language techniques as visualization and directionality. The computer-based instructional treatments were presented as an educational game called the "Yes-No Game," with…

A bibliography of 430 books, journal articles, papers, and other references on Acadian French written in English or French is divided into two principal sections: an annotated bibliography of works focusing on the Acadian French dialect spoken in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, and an unannotated bibliography pertaining to Louisiana Acadian…

Methods for teaching students to recognize and manipulate structures of cohesion in reading materials are discussed. Teaching students to connect text involves a strategy that combines reading and writing in student- and teacher-directed activities. An example illustrates how the strategy can be applied with specific course content, a ninth-grade…

A study of the relationship of language proficiency level and bilingualism or monolingualism to the comprehension of anaphoric third-person subject pronouns in 9- and 10-year-old children found that bilingual children have the same difficulty with anaphora as their monolingual counterparts. In the comprehension of the pronouns tested, partial…

Linguistics gives the student of literature an analytical tool whose sole purpose is to describe faithfully the workings of language. It provides a theoretical framework, an analytical method, and a vocabulary for communicating its insights--all designed to serve concerns other than literary interpretation and evaluation, but all useful for…

The question has been raised whether various measures of language proficiency that concentrate on different aspects of language are equivalent. Studies have been conducted by various agencies comparing language proficiency assessment instruments. Of interest here are the BINL, LAS, and BSM tests. Because each test has a different set of criteria…

Because language delay tends to persist, is predictive of later learning problems, and is closely associated with psychiatric disorders, it is important to identify language delay as early as possible. In this study, language delay at age 2 was investigated in 502 children who attended physicians. Language assessment is not routinely carried out…

Type of discourse and syntax are related; speech researchers will have to specify type of discourse for their results to be comparable with other studies. (JH)

The complete texts of 250 trade books for children in the primary grades were analyzed by computer in order to identify recurring two- and three-word strings. Of the 202,763-word sample that resulted, 89 two-word strings occurred 100 times or more, and only two three-word strings occurred more than 100 times. These frequencies represent,…