Paul Ammon

The validity of the probe-latency technique for assessing structure in language.

The probe-latency technique for assessing how language is structured by a hearer was evaluated for children and adults against syntactic criteria and found to validly separate noun and verb phrases. The technique also appears sensitive to structural variations within phrases. Structure was found relatively invariant over changes in length and in meaningfulness for adults. Children showed structural change as a function of length of input. The findings regarding length and meaningfulness were regarded as very tentative due to large individual differences between subjects, especially with children, on all tasks.

The perception of grammatical relations in sentences: A methodological exploration

Third-grade and college students listened to complex English sentences and performed two tasks. In the probe task, each sentence was followed immediately by the repetition of one word from the sentence and S responded with the next word in the sentence. For the question task, the probe word was replaced by a question about one of the basic grammatical relationships underlying the sentence, which S answered with a word from the sentence. Structural properties of the sentences were varied and the latencies of correct responses were recorded. Latencies in the probe task generally confirmed predictions from a model based on phrase structure. The results from both tasks suggested ways in which limitations on the listeners immediate memory affect the processing of a sentence.

Expertise in Teaching from a Developmental Perspective: The Developmental Teacher Education Program at Berkeley

Expertise in teaching is considered from a constructivist developmental perspective that has been applied both to the teaching of elementary school children and to the preparation of teachers in a two-year graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. The programs goals and practices are discussed with reference to developmental principles which hold that understandings are constructed gradually, through the learners own activity, within different knowledge domains. Evidence of the programs effectiveness in promoting expertise among student teachers and graduates is summarized in terms of a developmental sequence that teachers appear to go through in attaining constructivist understandings in the domain of pedagogy.

Effects of task on the perceptual organization of sentences

Children and college students listened to sentences and responded to a question or a probe word after each sentence. To prevent Ss from using different perceptual strategies in performing the two tasks, question items and probe items were presented in mixed lists. In the probe task, the relationship between sentence structure and correct response latencies resembled the findings of an earlier study with block lists. The results from the question task were less similar to those obtained earlier, perhaps because, with mixed lists, Ss tended to organize all sentences in a manner especially suited to the probe task. A different type of organization might be used in the process of comprehending a sentence solely for the purpose of answering questions.

Children's elicited imitations of controlled and rewritten reading texts.

Elicited imitation was used to investigate suspected conflicts between the controlled language of beginning reading texts and the natural linguistic expectations of young children

Assessing linguistic competence: when are children hard to understand?

It is argued that previous assessments of childrens knowledge of the hard to see type of construction were confounded by a variety of extra-linguistic factors. Therefore, the relatively delayed age of comprehension previously reported (6½–8 years) may have been due to younger childrens deficiencies in extralinguistic skills. In the present study, with these extralinguistic complications eliminated, the passing age was found to be 5 years, and even 4-year-olds evidenced considerable knowledge of the target structure. Other findings were: variation in sentence difficulty as a function of the syntactic and/or aspectual character of the verb; high test–retest reliability at all levels of performance; and a necessary-but-not-sufficient empirical relation between comprehension of the target construction and the passive. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the acquisition of this particular structure and for the general problem of detecting linguistic competence from performance.

Child and adult literacy from a cognitive-developmental point of view: Comments on the articles by Dyson and Lytle

Abstract The question of similarities and differences in child and adult literacy is addressed by means of comments on the articles by Dyson and Lytle, with particular reference to the cognitive-developmental principles of active construction and progressive restructuring of knowledge. It is noted that the Dyson and Lytle articles, taken together, present evidence which supports and extends the view that fundamental knowledge of written language is actively constructed from a variety of cognitive and social resources by children and adults alike, although the resources and processes involved in that construction clearly vary to some extent, both between and within age groups. With regard to progressive restructuring, it is concluded that the extent to which children and adults go through similar sequences in constructing knowledge of written language has not been further elucidated, in that neither Dyson nor Lytle tried to identify general developmental sequences in the learners they studied. The importance of identifying such sequences is argued both on theoretical and pedagogical grounds, and it is suggested that progress toward a better understanding of literacy development would be enhanced by more focussed attention to the question of exactly what develops, within the broader perspectives on literacy that Dyson and Lytle have proposed.