Grammatical Word Class Research Articles

DIRECT ACCESS AND PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING PROCESSES IN CHILDREN'S READING: EFFECTS OF WORD CHARACTERISTICS

Summary. Nine‐year‐old children were presented with reading tasks in which psycholinguistic properties of words were manipulated. Although word imageability affected reading accuracy, grammatical class of words and regularity of spelling‐to‐sound correspondence did not. Regularity had no effects on lexical decision and judgments of phonology. Accuracy in reading aloud and judgments of phonology was substantially lower for non‐words than for words. Only the best readers had well‐developed skills in grapheme‐to‐phoneme sound conversion, and all appeared to rely on direct visual access when reading. A sentence comprehension task devised by Doctor and Coltheart (1980) was used for investigating the role of phonological coding in reading for meaning. Phonological effects were evident since children found it difficult to reject meaningless sentences which sounded correct. It is argued that the phonological effects could arise through post‐lexical phonological coding. The results support models of reading acquisition which suggest that the development of non‐lexical grapheme‐phoneme conversion skills lags behind the development of direct visual access.

Choice of grammatical word-class without global syntactic analysis: Tagging words in the lob corpus

On presente le corpus LOB qui comprend cinq cents textes de deux mille mots, en anglais, realise sur support informatise. Les programmes destines a attribuer des classes grammaticales aux mots des textes, sont decrits en detail

Ratings of Sign Translucency & Gloss Concreteness of Two Grammatical Classes of Signs

Three hundred eighty sign/glosses of two grammatical word classes were rated for sign translucency and were compared to referent ratings made earlier on concreteness. The ratings revealed that verbs were rated significantly more translucent than nouns but less concrete than nouns. In terms of differences in concreteness and translucency within sign/glosses, verbs tended to be rated similarly for both variables, while individual nouns were rated higher in concreteness. Analysis of the rating categories for nouns and verbs indicated that the lower the rated translucency level of nouns and verbs, the greater the probability of differences between translucency and concreteness ratings. For levels of concreteness, differences in ratings between concreteness and translucency were greater for high concrete and low concrete words than for words of intermediate concreteness. Implications for teaching of signing to language-impaired individuals are discussed.

Children's First Word Combinations

BRAINE, MARTIN D. S. Children's First Word Combinations. With Commentary by MELISSA BOWERMAN. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1976, 41(1, Serial No. 164). A descriptive analysis is presented of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 children learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morphemes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data indicate that each child has learned a number of positional formulae that map components of meaning into positions in the surface structure. Each formula expresses a specific, often quite narrow, range of relational conceptual content. In each corpus, the bulk of the combinations are generated by a small number of such formulae; the differences between one corpus and another are considerable, and their nature indicates that the formulae are independent acquisitions. The formulae are not broad rules of the kind usual in transformational grammars; and the semantic categories are usually much more specific than those of case grammars or those proposed by Schlesinger (although Schlesinger's views are supported in other respects). Also, there is no evidence for grammatical word classes. In general, the evidence indicates less grammatical competence at this stage of development than children are being credited with in much current work. Two kinds of phenomena involving free word order are noted. One kind, not previously reported, is called a pattern: positional formulae are sometimes preceded by an earlier stage in which the components are unordered. The lack of order is due to the child groping to express a meaning before he has learned a rule that determines the position of the elements. The other kind is due to the learning of two formulae, one for each order: longitudinal study of some cases indicates that the two orders were learned at separate times and that they may have subtly different semantic content.

Effects of Grammatical Information on Word Predictability

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether providing a respondent with the designation of the grammatical form class of words deleted from prose contexts would affect his performance in a word prediction task. Word replacements were obtained under conditions where such designations were or were not provided. The results were analyzed in terms of whether response words corresponded in grammatical form class with deleted items (FC-score), as well as in terms of verbatim replacement of items (V-score). As anticipated, grammatical information did result in a greater FC-score as compared with the absence of such information, although this was greater for function-type words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, etc.) than for semantic-types (nouns, verbs, adjectives). As for verbatim replacement, grammatical information led to increased V-score only in the case of function-type words, as compared with the alternative condition of no information. These results were thought to be compatible with expectations based upon differences in the numbers of words belonging to the various form classes, as well as expectations regarding the effect of grammatical information upon contextual constraint.

Information Removed from Multiple-Choice Item Responses by Selected Grammatical Categories

Using a black-out technique, certain grammatical classes of words were deleted from standard reading-test paragraphs and the effects upon multiple-choice item responses examined. The deletion of nouns removed the most information, but many items were answered when the entire paragraph was deleted.

Auditory search for syllables embedded within meaningful sentences.

Sentence length, syllable position within a sentence, and grammatical class of word in which syllables were embedded were investigated with respect to their effects upon accuracy of syllable identification and response latency in a task of auditory search. Ninety-six university students listened to sentences, which were followed by a syllable that identified the target for search, and determined whether or not the identifying syllable appeared within the sentence preceding it. The time required for search was recorded in milli-seconds. Results indicate a strong negative relationship between accuracy of syllable identification and time required for search. Greatest accuracy and shortest response latencies occurred when syllables were embedded within the shortest sentences of the series (15 to 25 syllables in length), within the final fourth of a sentence, and within nouns, verbs, conjunctions, or prepositions rather than within adjectives and adverbs. Indications are that the task of auditory search requires a rapid, low level, minimal form of language processing and that semantic and syntactic clues are of major importance to successful, rapid processing. Theoretical concepts of selection, recoding, retention, and recall of auditory imputs are discussed in relation to the normal, daily processing of language.

Studies in Auditory Search

A previous paper presented at an ASA meeting (June, 1966) treated auditory search, involving the identification of syllables embedded within sentences. Results indicated relationships among lengths, syllable positions, word class in which syllables were embedded, and search time and accuracy of search. This paper extends the previous treatment and examines specifically several aspects of auditory search. Search time for the conditions in which syllables are present and absent were examined. Correct responses were always associated with shorter response latencies when the syllable was present; when the syllable was absent, search time for correct and incorrect responses were similar, with no consistent trend emerging. Examination of word class within which target syllables were located indicated that accuracy was poorer and search time longer for modifiers than for nouns, verbs, and connecting words. Although accuracy was similar for the latter three, time of search varied, indicating that search time may be a precise measurement for studies of this nature, and that the auditory processing of language may be greatly dependent on grammatical word class. Theoretical concepts relative to the possibility of different levels of language processing and the rôle of immediate memory in recall in the task of auditory search is discussed.