I noticed yesterday that Mark Liberman on Language Log has been
discussing the article I was referring to (and it's a very good
discussion, as is characteristic for Liberman's stuff):

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2440

--- Bill Spruiell


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2010 9:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Interesting (but maybe problematic) study

Bob,
   You make some fine points. I suspect any thoughtful research should
think about the kind of processing demands made by different kinds of
syntax.
    "The woman who kissed Charlie saw me" would actually be fairly easy
to
process if the intonation was mapped in. Trying to gather constituency
without the aid of intonation is an added difficulty. When students
who don't read well are asked to read aloud, it's often clear right
away that they haven't found the meaning.
   We also know from the corpus grammars that academic writing builds
complexity into noun phrases in a way that doesn't routinely happen in
ordinary speech.
   In a funny way, though, I think we may teach more reading
post-secondary than we do in high school, especially if reading is
thought of as distinct from "literature". We pay a great deal of
attention to it in our own program, though perhaps that's an anomaly.
The students coming out of high school can talk about "literary
elements" but don't have strategies for other kinds of reading. It
would be interesting to finds out how many colleges have programs for
dealing with that.

Craig

Craig


 I disagree with the following explanation about why we know so little
> about the reading abilities of high school graduates and their
knowledge
> of grammar.   Craig writes:
>
>     If students don't read well, is that at least partly because of
> grammar? I think so, but we haven't looked closely at that because the
> prevailing view has been that the grammar is already there or will
> arrive on its own.
>
> ***
> The reason "we" haven't looked closely is because there are very few
> reading courses in the post-secondary educational system. As a
> consequence, there is very little interesting in figuring out how such
> people read.
>
> [I looked at a recent issue of the Handbook of Reading and noticed the
> absence of research on adults.  At best, you will find summaries on
study
> habits.]
>
> On the other hand, because we expect everyone to be literate, there is
> support for research on the acquisition of reading.
>
> My sense is that many of those researchers interested in reading don't
> have a very good understanding of the nature of language and don't
have a
> very good theory of interpretation.
>
> For example, all of the major reading scales count words/syllables
with
> the assumption that shorter is easier. That is problematic on two
counts.
>
> One, deletions can require more knowledge of the language than full
> sentences.  Although (1) is shorter than (2), I would argue (1) is
hard to
> process because it requires recognizing that the relative clause is
not
> overtly marked.
>
> 1) There is the woman Charlie kissed.
> 2) There is the woman who Charlie kissed.
>
> Second, some constructions are more difficult to process than others.
> Consider heavy subject noun phrases as on such construction.  Although
> both (3) and (4) are the same length, I would suggest (4) is more
> difficult to process because of the subject.
>
> 3) I saw the woman who kissed Charlie.
> 4) The woman who kissed Charlie saw me.
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
> Craig
>
> Spruiell, William C wrote:
>> I ran across the following in ScienceDaily today. It's the kind of
>> research result for which I'd really, really want to see multiple
>> followup studies. The researchers found that a proportion of their
>> (adult) test subjects couldn
>
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