Usage Of Prepositions Research Articles

Some dimensions of auditory language comprehension in aphasia.

Four aspects of auditory comprehension were compared in 44 normal children ages 4 to 9, in 12 normal adults, and in 52 aphasics of 5 diagnostic classes: Broca’s, Wernicke’s, conduction, anomic, and global aphasics. The 4 aspects studied were breadth of vocabulary, auditory sequential pointing-span, comprehension of directional prepositions, and recognition of correct grammatical usage of prepositions. The aphasics' patterns of success were all different from those of the children, and the diagnostic subgroups could be distinguished from each other by a discriminant analysis. The mean pointing-span of the best aphasic group (anomics) was below the level of 6-year-olds. Broca’s aphasics had by far the poorest score. It is concluded that auditory comprehension is multidimensional, and that its pattern of disturbance is characteristic for different aphasic subgroups.

Modification of syntactic style

The present experiment was conducted to determine the role of appropriate modeling cues, reinforcement variables, and strong attentional responses in altering children's syntactic style. For an extremely infrequent response such as the passive construction, neither reinforcement nor modeling alone was effective in increasing the use of passives in sentences constructed by children in response to a set of simple nouns. However, children generated significantly more passives when verbal modeling cues were combined with attentional and reinforcement variables designed to increase syntactic discriminability. On the other hand, in the case of a syntactic category as common as prepositional phrases, reinforcement combined with an active attentional set increased children's usage of prepositions, but modeling cues were not a significant contributory factor. These findings indicate that syntactic responsivity which depends upon the acquisition of general rules rather than isolated responses can be accounted for in terms of social-learning principles.

On teaching verb constructions with prepositions k and y at Lithuanian schools

The article analyses Russian verb constructions with prepositions к and у and their equivalents in the Lithuanian language. Such verb constructions often constitute difficulties to Lithuanians learning the Russian language.
 Not knowing the exact meaning and usage of Russian prepositions, Lithuanian users often tend to replace Russian verb constructions with preposition к and by relevant constructions in their mother tongue, thus making rather many syntactic mistakes.
 The article analyzes the Russian verb constructions with prepositions к and у, expressing a variety of semantic relations and their parallel equivalents in Lithuanian are provided. Lithuanian constructions of such type can have either prepositional or non-prepositional form; on the other hand, the Russian preposition к has even several equivalents in the Lithuanian language (prie, pas, į), and the preposition y is also translated to Lithuanian in several ways (prie, pas, iš, etc.).
 The article simultaneously reviews two parallels of these constructions in the Lithuanian and Russian languages, namely: Russian verb constructions with prepositions к and у and Lithuanian constructions with prepositions prie and pas, expressing spatial and object-spatial relations.
 At the end, the article presents various exercises concerning verb agreement in the Russian and Lithuanian languages so that the learners can practice the correct usage of the mentioned verb constructions in Russian.