TWENTY HEAD START PRESCHOOL CHILDREN WERE GIVEN THREE LANGUAGE TASKS DESIGNED TO MEASURE THEIR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT--(1) A PRODUCTION TASK REQUIRED THE CHILDREN TO ENGAGE IN FREE SPEECH. THE CHILDREN WERE ASKED TO ANSWER A QUESTION, TO DESCRIBE A SERIES OF PICTURES, AND TO RETELL A STORY. THE FREE SPEECH OF THE CHILDREN IN RESPONSE TO THESE…

MUCH OF LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHING IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT WORDS ARE NATURAL UNITS OF LANGUAGE AND THAT PRINTED WORDS HAVE ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCES WITH WORDS IN SPEECH. THE OUTCOME OF THIS ASSUMPTION IS TO EMPHASIZE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD'S SIGHT VOCABULARY AND WORD PERCEPTION, ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO THE TEACHING OF READING.…

This report discusses a study of a Norwegian six-year-old child's acquisition of English syntax in a second language environment. Interrogative and negative sentences which require periphrasis with "do" are the forms considered in the analysis. Although the formal aim of the study is limited to an effort at discovering more about developmental…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

To determine if there are qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the syntactic errors committed by good and poor readers, two studies were conducted. In the first, 31 third graders, grouped as either good or poor readers according to reading grade equivalent scores, completed a 300 word cloze passage. The results suggested that poor…

The ability of primary grade black students to recover deep structure and the degree to which that ability is affected by socioeconomic status, dialect, word recognition, and the child's management of syntactic structures in oral language (oral syntactic control) were investigated in a study involving 125 second grade students. The Deep Structure…

This paper suggests that traditional syntax describes a sentence's syntactic structure, and that verb valence theory describes a sentence's semantic structure. According to this theory, a verb has a certain valence, or power to attract a certain number of "adjuncts." It is further shown that a given semantic structure can be converted into…

Starting with a model for explaining comprehension and noncomprehension of verbal material in terms of a match/mismatch principle, this project developed a scale of language usage and explored hypotheses about how comprehension may become possible if a child does not now comprehend some particular oral or written text. Eight separate reports are…

The purposes of this study were (1) to provide a method for the quantitative study of grammatical (syntactic) structures which is coherent, systematic, and broad, yet capable of refinement to accommodate details, and (2) to search for the developmental trends in the frequency of various grammatical structures written by students of average…

Recent work in word-order typology has demonstrated that the dominant order of verbs and objects (or complements) correlates well with the general ordering tendencies of languages. The work on German reported in this paper suggests, however, that certain traits, such as the order of adverbials, are influenced not only by general ordering…

The UNT project (Instructional Methods in German), begun in 1965 and ended in 1974, had as its principal aims (1) to investigate scientifically certain prerequisites for and methodological approaches to teaching German to Swedish comprehensive school pupils and (2) in the light of this investigation and with the aid of successive trails and…

This paper is intended to be the first part of a study contrasting the subjunctive of French with that of English and comparing it in both languages with the syntactic devices that can replace it. It examines the syntactic constraints on the use of subjunctive forms in French, the semantic contrast between indicative and subjunctive forms, and the…

Right dislocations are expressions of the following form: (1) "They told the Grand Jury a number of lies, the Nixon men." (2) "We find we have to limit our social schedule, my husband and I." (3) "Mary always wears a frown, the ugly witch." They are found also almost exclusively in the spoken language. This paper…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

This study focused on the following questions involved in the implementation of the language experience approach: (1) Which tutor will produce the most effective responses? (2) What is the reality of the existence of a Black English vernacular syntax? and (3) Is there evidence of black-white linguistic overlap? Natural, transcribed conversations…