Grammatical Factors Research Articles

Transformational complexity and sentence difficulty: a developmental study.

Two studies investigated the validity of an index of transformational complexity in predicting the difficulty of sentence recall and completion by young children. For seven groups of subjects aged from three to seven years, a scalogram analysis yielded high reproducibility coefficents across eight sentence types on a delayed recall task. Children's abilities to complete semantically appropriate sentences of various types was less predictable due to the extreme difficulty of passives. There was a linear relationship between age and frequencies of correct recall and completion. An examination of errors indicated that children strive to produce meaningful sentences despite limited knowledge of complex logical relationships in some sentence types. These limitations appear to constrain the child's grammatical competence. Hence the predicted order of sentence difficulty need not be interpreted as strong support for the primacy of grammatical factors in determining sentence complexity during the acquisition of language.

The grammatical factor in childhood disfluency in relation to the continuity hypothesis.

The relationship between grammatical function and disfluency was investigated in 15 normal-speaking children aged three years 11 months to four years 10 months. Pronouns and conjunctions appeared in significantly greater proportion among the subjects' disfluent words than among their total words. On the other hand, nouns, verbs, and prepositions had a significantly low frequency of disfluency. In many respects, the results were similar to those previously found for preschool stutterers, though a notable difference occurred in the case of verbs. The findings were interpreted to be in general accord with the hypothesis that a continuity exists between early stuttering and certain forms of normal childhood disfluency.

Implicit and Explicit Grammatical Factors and Reading Achievement in the Deaf

A number of investigators have noted the rather striking deficiency in the ability of the deaf to develop a high level of reading achievement. One such investigator (Furth, 1966, pp. 13-15) has speculated on the cause: The hearing individual enjoys a comfortable mastery of the language even though he may be retarded in reading. For the deaf on the other hand, the reading level is the ceiling of linguistic competence. It is quite inappropriate to designate this latter condition as retardation in reading. It is properly termed incompetence or deficiency in verbal language. . Reading ability in the deaf is not the same thing as word recognition: it is more aptly described as the degree to which the language of the culture has been mastered. Certainly, lack of competency in a language should be a limiting factor on one's ability to read in that language. It follows from this position that a low reading achievement level on the part of the deaf is not to be interpreted as retardation in reading, but as an index of linguistic incompetence, while an equally low level obtained by a hearing person with normal language development more often indicates an inability to recognize words or retain sequences for decoding. A reading test probably measures, then, two distinct capabilities in the two populations: (1) reading ability in the hearing and. (2)

THE VARIATION IN NON-FINITE COMPLEMENTS IN SERBIAN: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE AT AN INTRA-SPEAKER LEVEL

The paper investigates the nature of syntactic variation in non-finite complements of modal verbs in Serbian. Specifically, we examine what factors may underlie the intra-speaker variation in the choice of infinitive over da+present, and how these differences can be represented structurally. The empirical data from a restricted corpus study confirm the observation from the literature that infinitive is often used for stylistic reasons and in impersonal contexts. What we have also found is that for the speaker infinitive is preferred with abstract or non-referential subjects, with stative complements and in the context of epistemic rather than deontic modals. We hypothesize that all the grammatical factors converge around the pivotal role of the subject in the two constructions. An account that predicts enough structural similarity between da+present and infinitive to allow virtual interchangeability, while postulating enough difference in terms of the role of the subject to accommodate the observed differences could, thus, be a good candidate to explain the observed phenomena.

Grammatical function in relation to stuttering in young children.

Samples of the speech of 13 stutterers from two to six years of age were studied to determine to what extent the distribution of stutterings was related to the grammatical functions of words. The findings were markedly different from those reported on older stutterers. For the most part the stutterings were randomly distributed with respect to the grammatical factor, but there was a tendency for stuttering to occur unusually often on pronouns and conjunctions and less often, in relation to chance expectation, on nouns and interjections. The excessive stuttering on pronouns and conjunctions appeared to be largely the effect of the high frequency of stuttering on the first word of the sentence. It was concluded that a true grammatical factor does not exist in the initial phase of stuttering, and probably emerges only with the emergence of difficult words.

Grammatical factors in sentence retention

A rationale for indexing the structural complexity of sentences was introduced and an experiment reported that demonstrated the relationship between this index and sentence retention. The proposed measure entails a phrase-structure analysis of the sentence and a counting of the grammatical commitments incurred by each word of the sentence. A word is said to be structurally embedded in a sentence to the extent that it determines the structure of those parts of the sentence that follow. In a six-trial free-learning experiment where sentence complexity and sentence kind were manipulated independently and sentence length held constant, sentences of lesser indexed complexity were recalled significantly more frequently than sentences of greater complexity. The role of sentence kind was found to affect recall, but not in the systematic way predicted by the transformation-grammar model.

"STUTTERING" IN NORMAL SPEECH.

“Stuttering” in normal speech occurs more on lexical items than on function words, This and other recent general research in hesitation phenomena correlate closely with previous research in the loci of stuttering in the speech of stutterers. They all suggest the “stuttering” is closely related to grammatical factors. Current research by both descriptive linguists and by psycholinguist will be of relevance to further research in the properties of stuttered words.

A Study of the Relationship Between Stuttering Occurrence and Grammatical Factors in Oral Reading

No AccessJournal of Speech DisordersResearch Article1 Dec 1942A Study of the Relationship Between Stuttering Occurrence and Grammatical Factors in Oral Reading Eugene F. Hahn Eugene F. Hahn Wayne University Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/jshd.0704.329 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Additional Resources FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research46:6 (1468-1470)1 Dec 2003Major Problems With a RevisitMarcel E. WingateJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research46:6 (1471-1472)1 Dec 2003Interpreting Differences in Stuttering Frequency on Content and Function WordsVikram N. Dayalu, Joseph Kalinowski and Andrew StuartJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research45:5 (871-878)1 Oct 2002Stuttering Frequency on Content and Function Words in Adults Who StutterVikram N. Dayalu, Joseph Kalinowski, Andrew Stuart, Donald Holbert and Michael P. RastatterJournal of Speech Disorders10:3 (181-192)1 Sep 1945The Loci of Stutterings In The Speech SequenceSpencer F. Brown Volume 7Issue 4December 1942Pages: 329-335 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in issue: Dec 1, 1942 Metrics Topicsasha-topicsasha-article-typesleader-topicsCopyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1942 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationPDF downloadLoading ...

A Study of the Relationship Between the Social Complexity of the Oral Reading Situation and the Severity of Stuttering

No AccessJournal of Speech DisordersResearch Article1 Mar 1940A Study of the Relationship Between the Social Complexity of the Oral Reading Situation and the Severity of Stuttering Eugene F. Hahn Eugene F. Hahn Wayne University Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/jshd.0501.05 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Additional Resources FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research42:6 (1347-1354)1 Dec 1999Effects of Monitoring Condition and Frequency-Altered Feedback on Stuttering FrequencyJoseph Kalinowski, Andrew Stuart, Loma Wamsley and Michael P. RastatterJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research33:4 (690-706)1 Dec 1990Autonomic Correlates of Stuttering and Speech Assessed in a Range of Experimental TasksChristine M. Weber and Anne SmithJournal of Speech Disorders10:3 (193-197)1 Sep 1945The Influence of Propositionality On StutteringJon Eisenson and Esther HorowitzJournal of Speech Disorders7:4 (293-380)1 Dec 1942A Bibliography of Articles Relating to Laryngeal ParalysesChas. StrotherJournal of Speech Disorders7:4 (329-335)1 Dec 1942A Study of the Relationship Between Stuttering Occurrence and Grammatical Factors in Oral ReadingEugene F. Hahn Volume 5Issue 1March 1940Pages: 5-14 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in issue: Mar 1, 1940 Metrics Topicsasha-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1940 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationPDF downloadLoading ...