To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

A number of studies on the acquisition of communicative competence (the ability to communicate effectively in natural social settings) in varying cultural and social settings are described. Languages covered are English, including urban Afro-American dialects; Samoan; Tzeltal, an Indian language of Southern Mexico; Luo of Kenya; and the Spanish of…

Three papers, based on a study done with 160 Wisconsin fourth- and sixth-graders, are presented in an attempt to contribute to the psycholinguistic information needed in developing elementary English language learning programs. The first paper, "A Linguistic Ability Test for Elementary Grades," discusses a written test made up of 15 linguistic…

This report describes in two volumes the proceedings of a conference on the perception of language held at the University of Pittsburgh in January, 1968. The objectives of the conference, to present the particular research interests of the participants and to attempt to find points of concurrence in thinking through discussion of the conference…

In an epilogue to the 1967 research report, "Transformational Sentence-Combining" (See ED 018 405.), John Mellon considers the significance of the sentence-combining experience and answers the charges of critics--Wayne O'Neil, James Moffett, and Francis Christensen--regarding his original research findings. Mellon points out, for example, that…

Identifiable relational entities in the Auxiliary (Aux) structure of Nonstandard Negro English (NNE) enter into different sets of relationship from identifiable relational entities in the Aux structure of Standard English (SE). Specifically, there is an absence of "have + en" structures; there is no agreement between subjects and verbal forms…

The purposes of this study were: (1) to describe the developmental trends in the control of spoken English grammatical constructions produced by Spanish-speaking Mexican-American schoolchildren learning English in the elementary grades, and (2) on the basis of this description to assess the comparative development of English structures in pupils…

The author finds Katz and Postal's 1964 generative semantic theories concerning the organization of grammar incorrect and proposes an interpretive approach to semantics in which syntactic structures are given interpretations by an autonomous semantic component. The research reported leads the author to describe a generative grammar consisting of…

A review of traditional and transformational studies on the phenomenon of sentential complementation (noun clauses) reveals many areas of agreement. Although some adherents of generative grammar may have occasionally obscured this aspect because of the offensive nature of their criticism of other modes of analysis, it is seen that, in several…

This report presents a summary of the research designed to develop a psycholinguistics of comprehension and memory for meaningful written prose paragraphs. The approach departs from most previous ones by seeking to formulate an explicit theory, instead of relying on informal qualitative judgments as to paragraph structure, the scoring of data, and…

The primary purpose of this experiment was to see if instructional materials created for fourth graders could enhance their normal syntactic development, and if these materials would succeed better with black or with white students. For one school year a sentence-combining curriculum was demonstrated on 180 students who had been grouped…

The possible usefulness of computer poetry is concerned with what the programmer can learn about language, about poetry, and about poets. The problems in designing computer programs to construct poetry include considerations in generating well-formed sentences which have the added restrictions that poetry requires: meter, rhyme, logic, diction,…

A study in which the patterns and possibilities of free modifiers in the writing habits of three students, who were rated low in language ability, is described. The primary purpose of the study was to determine if complicated syntactic elements used as free modifiers could be lifted from the complex subject of grammar and be presented as…

The second edition of this annotated bibliography on linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the teaching of reading contains 40 percent more publications than the earlier edition, which covered works through 1967. The citations include a full range of points of view, topics, and authors' special fields and ask the readers to read a number of the…

This document contains three reports in prepublication form on research conducted by linguists at the University of Colorado. The first paper presents an argument against the theories concerning the concept of the distributional syllable. Such theories are based on the assumptions that the syllable can and should be defined formally, without…