A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

The effects of message structure, required recall structure, and receiver apprehension on the recall of message information were studied in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial analysis of variance with fixed effects. Subjects were 238 college students who scored either high or low in communication apprehension. A category clustering scheme was used to…

Two experiments were conducted using nine- through twelve-year-old readers to determine how they differed from adults in their ability to identify meaningful units in a written passage, how they were affected by sentences of increasing difficulty, and whether they would be aided by either shorter sentences or meaningful segmentation of sentences.…

Researchers examined the first in-class essays and the final exam essays of 24 freshman writing students to determine the syntactic maturity these students gained during an eight-month period. Counting the words, T-units, clauses, and sentences for each of the 48 essays created data about mean words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, words per…

The first half of this document reports on research that explores the ways in which knowledge of the world affects judgments of sentence acceptability. Sixty children in grades four through eight were studied at two times, one year apart. The subjects were first interviewed regarding their knowledge of the world in order to identify their role…

Current research in reading indicates that what the reader brings to the printed page is far more important to comprehension than the information appearing there. This paper presents a model of how the integration of reading and writing skills can be undertaken, thereby strengthening both skill areas. With selections from a literary text and a…

The comprehension of the Minimum Distance Principle was examined in three experiments, using the "tell/promise" sentence construction. Experiment one compared the listening and reading comprehension of singly presented sentences, e.g. "John tells Bill to bake the cake" and "John promises Bill to bake the cake." The…

The seventh volume of this series contains five articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "The English Gerund as a Subject and its Serbo-Croatian Structural Equivalents," by Ljiljana Bibovic; "Relators," by Vladimir Ivir, D. McMillan and T. Merz; "The Source of Relative Clauses," by Ljiljana…

Two experiments were carried out to see what parts of a sentence are best retained, whether those parts retained best immediately after acquisition are also remembered best after a 48 hour retention interval, and whether or not the parts of a sentence which are retained depend on the semantic and syntactic structure of that sentence. In the first…

The Lexicalist-interpretive approach to inalienable possession adopted in this paper proposes that body parts are generated with either the article (the unmarked determiner) or the possessive adjective (the marked determiner). The unmarked body part is codesignate with the indirect object; in the case of pseudo-transitives--a clearly delimited…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…

As may be seen from data collected during language observations of four children over a period of two and a half years, children's sentences are not simply flawed versions of adult counterparts, but seem to result from a different grammar. These data indicate that logical formatives, such as "even," and "only," are sentence-initial constituents.…

The first part of this paper provides a description and discussion of the major aspects of the process of relativization in Israeli Hebrew: (a) the use of a subordinating relative particle which in most cases can neither be deleted nor replaced and which is prefixed to the first constituent of the embedded S; (b) the obligatory pronominalization…

In Mandarin Chinese the two lexical items "de" and "bu," when inserted into a verb-verb construction, function as positive and negative potential markers, respectively, Their insertion, however, is not very regular or uniform, because some V-V constructions require their presence, while some others take them optionally, and…