Discusses the use of prepositional phrases as subjects and objects through consideration and analysis of: (1) characteristics of such phrases; (2) category status of prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions; and (3) sentences containing prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions. (CB)

Normal and Specific Language Impaired (SLI) children were tested for evidence of the binding domain and orientation properties of their grammars. Results suggest that normal children acquiring English pass through a long-distance binding stage, whereas SLI children behave like very young normal children in requiring the nearest available noun…

Various theories of learning for the categories "count noun" and "mass noun" are compared. It is argued that children assign words to these categories on the basis of intuitions arising from perception that are relevant to Macnamara's (1986) definitions of the categories. (39 references) (GLR)

English contains many nominals that would be absent in Chinese because Chinese makes greater use of "zero anaphora," which is an empty grammatical slot in a sentence standing for a previously mentioned referent. Native Chinese and native English speakers were compared in comprehending modified English passages from a standardized reading test with…

Students in intermediate language courses, especially conversational courses, can benefit from a simple set of instructions for combining words and phrases into sentences. A description of the basic concepts determining word order in German--the fundamental sequence of clause elements, the "infrastructure," and the movement rules by which the…

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being…

Assesses the performance of bilingual children on two language tasks in both the children's languages in order to determine whether the profile of skills in the first language was replicated in the second language. (HOD)

This study, consisting of two experiments, investigated the role of verb information in resolving ambiguous noun phrases (NPs) in reading comprehension. Both experiments extended earlier studies. The first measured and compared reading time for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous subject complements and unambiguous complements, which were…

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined…

The interaction hypothesis proposes that valid test accommodations benefit only those with disabilities. To evaluate this hypothesis, Grade 3 students with word decoding difficulties identified with dyslexia and average decoders were randomly assigned to take the same version of the Texas reading accountability assessment under accommodated and…

Four papers address trends and issues in Hispanic linguistics. "Recent Trends in Hispanic Linguistics" (Frank Nuessel) gives an overview of benchmarks in research on diachronic, sociolinguistic, and applied aspects of Spanish phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. "African Influence on Hispanic Dialects" (John Lipski)…

This contrastive grammar based on modern linguistic theory considers noun and verb phrases as the primary morphological and syntactical structure of language. A section on the noun phrase examines: (1) types of noun phrase constructions; (2) gender and number; (3) elements, expansion, and substitutes of the noun phrase. The material on the verb…

An attempt to shed some light on one type of linguistic structure, that structure which is sometimes called a structure of modification, is presented. The study is based on a fairly limited, but statistically ample corpus of 1,200 sentences taken from four metropolitan daily newspapers for the two years 1894 and 1964. From various sources a…

The effects of integrated pictures of nouns, training in imagining relations between separate pictures of nouns, and the combination of training and integrated pictures on the recall of noun triplets were assessed in children from grades one, three, and six. The cued recall of nouns under these three conditions was from 2 to 6 times greater than…