Describes a study of the effect of deletion-produced sentence structures on reading comprehension, the occurrence of deletion-produced sentence structures in a selected grade seven social studies text, and the effect of syntactic information in sentence structures in relation to contentive information on reading comprehension. (JM)

This study tested the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text. The thirty-four subjects were asked to write 1,000 words of prose dealing with social…