A child's ability to understand text (reading comprehension) can greatly impact both their ability to learn in the classroom and their future contributions to society. Reading comprehension draws on oral language; behavioural measures of knowledge at the word and sentence levels have been shown to be related to children's reading comprehension. In…

The current study examined the degree to which the quality and characteristics of students' essays could be modeled through dynamic natural language processing analyses. Undergraduate students (n = 131) wrote timed, persuasive essays in response to an argumentative writing prompt. Recurrent patterns of the words in the essays were then analyzed…

This paper describes how a constraint dependency grammar (CDG) parser performs a syntactic analysis of a single sentence (as part of a speech recognition system). The paper extends an existing CDG (developed by H. Maruyama) to process a lattice or graph of sentence hypotheses instead of separate text strings. The paper also describes how the CDG…

First language acquisition studies reveal that children overextend the minimal distance principle (MDP) during their acquisition of infinitive complement structures. The MDP dictates the interpretation of the logical subject of the infinitive in these structures and overrides marked lexical features such as subject control. Misinterpretations by…

An experimental study investigating the interaction of linguistic complexity and performance in child language acquisition tests the hypothesis that children learning a first language acquire relatively complex sentences somewhat later than less complex sentences. In one of three tests, the subjects, 44 children aged 3.6 to 6 years, were presented…

The application of the "back-propagation" learning algorithm to the task of determining the right set of features corresponding to the words in an input sentence is described. Features that are specific to particular nouns and verbs, that indicate whether a nominal constituent is singular or plural, definite or indefinite, and that…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

An experiment was carried out to determine how the memory search of a two-clause complex sentence in immediate memory is carried out. An item-recognition task was performed with 32 native English-speaking, right-handed adults who listened to eight two-clause complex sentences presented to the left ear, each immediately followed by a probe word…

A discussion of English-speaking children's use of subjectless sentences contrasts the competence and performance explanations for the phenomenon. In particular, it reviews evidence indicating that the phenomenon does not reflect linguistic competence, but rather performance constraints. A tentative model of children's production is presented…

Many researchers now believe that the representations and processes underlying syntactical development are specific to a "language faculty." If so, reference animacy would not be expected to influence acquisition of linguistic structures such as the passive sentence construction. Specifically, children should be comparably able to…

A comparison of measures of the attained writing proficiency of 45 college-level students of English as a second language is reported. Students were tested by two indirect measures, the Test of the Ability to Subordinate (TAS) and the Revision and Editing Test (RET), and their compositions were evaluated by a direct measure, holistic evaluation.…

A study of eight adult chronic aphasic patients' comprehension of sentences and pictures in which comparisons of time and space were crucial was designed to assess A. R. Luria's approach to designing comprehension test tasks. The investigation required patients, with lesions of varying size and location, to determine whether a sentence expressing…

Two experiments examined the process of acquisition of sentence structure in the passive voice among young children. The subjects were several hundred monolingual French-speaking children aged 4-11 in schools in Liege, Belgium. The two experiments used different subject groups. In the first experiment, the children were required to interpret…