The primary purpose of this study was to determine if training in syntactic structures would increase reading performance of junior high school students. A total of 46 students in a predominately white middle class suburban school district who were reading at least two years below grade placement were divided into two groups: 24 students were…

The sentence intonation of Panjabi (a tone language) is described, as it is spoken in the district of Sialkot in West Pakistan. A system of phonetic transcription is established, and the intonation of sentences and questions is treated in two chapters. (JB)

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a study of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric of the sentence in enhancing the syntactic fluency of seventh graders as measured by Kellogg Hunt's normative data, and it identified demographic and syntactic features which affect student writing performance. The study involved 149 students and three…

In order to determine if there is a significant difference in the capitalization skills, punctuation skills, and word usage and sentence structure recognition skills of students who have had one year of shorthand instruction, two sample groups (shorthand and non-shorthand) were obtained from three English populations (no English or nongrammar…

This study looked at the period when language development overlaps the early years of reading, to see how children read and comprehend complex syntactic structures. Thirty-six second, third, and fourth graders, who were considered average readers, were tested in the first experiment using a reading test to determine comprehension of individual…

Four hypotheses concerning the linguistic structure of yes-no questions and their answers are considered as hypotheses relating to the abstract structure of yes-no questions and to this abstract structure in all human languages. The universal base hypotheses are the following: (1) The abstract representation of all yes-no questions includes two…

The purpose of this study were to survey scientific research, professional literature, and doctoral dissertations on reading comprehension done from 1948 to 1972, to identify the reading factors believed to affect reading comprehension, to analyze the identified reading factors by studying the major available research and related literature, to…

This study attempted to validate both the Fry-Kernel Distance Theory and the De Pierro findings, in determining the suitability of text material for the students to be instructed. First-year community college students were presented with sentences arranged in pairs, each representing two of four prescribed types. Subjects were to select the harder…

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…

This study was designed to examine how the form class and position of a word in a sentence influence the ability of primary-grade students to use available context to correctly guess an unknown word. Forty-three second-grade-level readers were asked to read orally four cloze passages that had been constructed from first-grade-level, basal reading…

Predictors of relative clause production in adult second language acquisition were examined through a replication and extension of a study by Schachter (1974). The present study is different in that it was based on oral instead of written production and it was designed to examine avoidance with the consideration that avoidance presupposed choice.…

The linguistic literature contains many studies of the structure of the noun phrase. Syntactic structures that occupy NP position but which don't have the internal characteristics of a substantive (infinitives and THAT clauses, for example) are distinguished from lexical structures that occupy NP position and do have the internal characteristics…

In order to assess the relationship between knowledge of language structure and reading comprehension, the English Language Structure Test was constructed. In this test, students had to reconstruct scrambled sentences of controlled complexity. The English Language Structure Test and the Stanford Reading Test were administered to 202 junior high…

Fifteen inner-city senior English classes in a New York City high school participated in this study of the effect of behavioral objectives on achievement in English sentence skills. Students were pretested with a measure of tolerance of ambiguity and a test consisting of correct sentences, sentence fragments, and run-on sentences. Teachers then…

Constraining linguistic metatheory by demanding that it allow the construction of grammars for all the frequently occurring idiolects of standard American English is shown to narrow the choices among competing theoretical positions. In this way data from a nonhomogeneous speech community are used to illuminate rather than cloud a theoretical…