This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

The article offers teachers suggestions on ways to instruct elementary students in the vocabulary of mathematics. It gives examples of math difficulties at the elementary school level, math difficulties related to vocabulary, and math difficulties related to problem solving. (DB)

Reviews and discusses experimental and observational research on the function of the social environment of the child in the mastery of syntactic regularities during language acquisition. Theories based on modeling, imitation, and reinforcement are addressed. A 73-item reference list accompanies the text. (Author/JL)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

Linguistic profiles of 7 dyslexic, 7 mildly dyslexic, 30 average, 16 good readers were examined at kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 4. Groups did not differ in language comprehension but did differ in confrontation and rapid automatized naming, three syntactic measures, and verbal memory. Kindergarten ability at giving letter sounds and rapid…

A 7-month longitudinal study of 20 2- and 3-year-old children shows that children at an early age already know that counting words each refer to a distinct numerosity, although they do not know to which numerosity. It takes children a long time to learn the latter. (SLD)

Examined the extent to which maternal linguistic input enabled children to use syntactic bootstrapping. Studied uses of 25 common verbs in speech of 57 mothers to their 1-year olds and 2-year olds. Found that verbs can be used to create informative syntactic frames, syntactic frames can cue appropriate verb class, and multiple syntactic framing…