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…

Three groups of 20 subjects received two exposures of a list of ten sentences followed by an immediate written recall test. The sentences varied in syntactic complexity from group to group, but the sentences for the three groups were similar in semantic content. The effect of sentence complexity upon recall performance was not found to be…

The game "Giant Steps" was described. It was designed to aid children in the semantic development of verbs. The purpose of the experimental evaluation was to determine whether playing the game actually did influence the associative structure of those verbs and adverbs that are "guessed" words in the game. Third graders from two classrooms in an…

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that development of syntactic comprehension through verbal modeling is enhanced by referent concreteness as a contextual influence. Subjects were 48 children from 3 1/2 to 5 years old. (Author/JH)

This study examined the influence of semantic consistency (meaningfulness) and anomaly on the learning of three types of syntactic pairs. The results showed that meaningful pairs are learned with fewer errors than anomalous pairs. (Author)

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)

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)

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)

The role of imagery formation as a mnemonic device in drawing valid inferences from a prose passage was studied. The 72 undergraduate subjects were divided into two groups: one given instructions to form images for the objects discussed in the text, the other given instructions to repeat each sentence five times. Half the passages consisted of…

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)

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

The influence of two aspects of language structure, syntax and associativity, on the free recall of verbal messages was investigated. (Syntax refers to the rules for ordering words within sentences; associativity refers to the network of meaningful relationships which exist among words in a language.) Twenty-four children from each of grades…