Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

Two comprehension-time experiments were conducted to identify factors affecting the comprehensibility of written materials. The subjects (a total of 52 college students for the two experiments) were presented with pairs of sentences--"context" sentences followed by "target" sentences--and were asked to relate the content of the target sentences to…

Examines referential functions of demonstratives in Chinese discourse. Findings indicate that use of the zero-demonstrative in Chinese is the unmarked form of reference roughly corresponding to the referential function of "the" or "it" in English. Demonstratives in Chinese are a marked form of reference roughly corresponding to…

The distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses.…

The most frequently noted difference in the abilities of tenth graders and college seniors to recall sentence connectives was the college students' ability to engage in free recall and rewriting, indicating that such a task would be a good predictor of mature use of transformational sentence connectives in the study of English. (JD)

Studies the kinds of errors made by American learners of Russian, the reasons for these errors, change in error patterns, and resemblance between the errors of foreign and primary language learners. (42 references) (CK)

This study, involving 16 intermediate-grade children with mild mental retardation, 29 children with learning disabilities, and 37 children without disabilities, found that all groups recalled cohesive story versions better than noncohesive versions. Statements in the stories' causal chain were better recalled than statements not in the causal…

Noting that although some children read aloud with apparent fluency, they fail to understand fully or remember connected discourse, this book brings together research on children who have a specific comprehension deficit. The book first provides an introduction and overview of adult and child text comprehension, and then describes the research.…

A study investigated the exophoric function of the pronouns "it, they, he, she" and related forms in four English conversations. It analyzed the frequency and characteristics of the occurrence of those exophoric pronouns and found that they were much less frequent than endophoric pronouns. It also found that the exophoric pronoun groups…

A study examined the effects of prior knowledge and the explicitness of text connectivity on various measures of reading ability. Subjects were 130 eighth grade students who read 6 prose passages that had been manipulated for content familiarity and for use of explicit connectives and implied connectives (those brought about by the author's…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

The focus of this experiment was on the effects of associative strength on retention of connected discourse, in terms of both single words and strings of words. Also of interest was the short- and long-term retention of two types of information, verbatim and substance. Verbatim information covered words and word sequences identical to those in the…

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to…

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)