This volume presents a summary of work accomplished since the Spanish conquest in the contemporary description and historical reconstruction of the indigenous languages and language families of Mexico and Central America. Contents are (1) "History of Studies in Middle American Linguistics" by N.A. McQuown; (2) "Inventory of…

Skilled reading depends upon a multiplicity of perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes; inadequate development of one or more of these processes may in turn lead to reading difficulty. This report considers some of the processes that may be especially problematic for the young reader. After an overview in which skilled reading is described…

The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable instrument that could be used by teachers and staff in Colorado to assist in the assessment of oral English language, particularly the syntax and the phonology of first-grade children in bilingual bicultural education (BBE). The study also related the scores of the instrument to seven variables:…

In order to determine the effects of writing for different audiences and in different modes of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth and tenth grade students, 240 students were asked to write in three different modes (argumentive, descriptive, and narrative) to be read by a teacher and a best friend. There was a…

The years after children demonstrate comprehension of particular syntactic structures have received little attention. What happens in language development after mastery is achieved? Are children then like adult speakers in judging the acceptability of grammatical structures? Questions addressed in this research were: Will older children and young…

Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

This study was designed to determine whether the content of selected beginning reading textbooks is comparable in syntactic complexity to the oral language of normal first-grade children and whether there was a predictable progression of syntactic complexity within the textbooks examined. The ten samples were taken from the primary levles of the…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic differences in the spontaneous speech of language-deviant children in two very different situations. Spontaneous speech samples of eleven five-year-old language-deviant children were obtained from: (1) the traditional adult-child therapy situation using appropriate stimulus materials; and…

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…

This study investigates the effect of mode of expression on the syntactic complexity of writing produced by third-grade children. Approximately 200 samples of writing in the modes of argumentation, exposition, narration, and description were collected from 50 third graders in the Atlanta school district. Syntactic complexity, as measured by length…

More than 250,000 of Fiji's citizens are descendants of Indian indentured laborers of diverse origins. There are still distinct social groups based on language, religion, and place of origin. However, nearly all Fiji Indians speak one language called Fiji Hindustani. Other languages, such as Gujarati, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, are still spoken,…

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…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

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…