By Robert Oliphant

What's more delightful than watching a two-year old, just on the verge of speech, who can understand and comply with a request like, "Please pick up a cookie and take it over to Uncle Oscar"? Or conversely what's more terrifying than to reach the bottom of a printed page (often late at night) and realize you HAVEN'T UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU JUST READ - even though you knew the meaning of each word one by one. Just as sentence comprehension represents our first baby step toward conscious social existence, so its deterioration is a recognizably dangerous step toward language loss and the dark night of senile dementia.

There's no doubt that our ability to make sense out of sentences is monumentally complex, as instanced by the failure of our best linguistic scientists, Chomskyite or Bloomfieldian , to come up with a Star Trek solution to the problem of machine translation. But as a practical diagnosis, it's surprisingly easy to test our sentence comprehension skills - even with 7-year-olds.

By way of an illustrative test: Appendix One presents the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner and simply asks our hypothetical 7-year-old to guess which underlined words are explicitly listed in a desk dictionary as transitive verbs, usually with the italicized abbreviation vt . For children or adults, even without an explanation of what's meant by "transitive," it's simply amazing how many correct "guesses" we make once we get the hang of it.

As far as 7-year-olds go, Appendix Two presents "The Transitive-Verb Surfer," a short poem that explains the relationship between transitive verbs, their various forms (infinitives, participles, etc.), and their so-called "objects." By way of a more challenging test, Appendix Three presents Lincoln 's Gettysburg Address with its transitive verbs underlined and asks the test taker to identify which words function as "objects" for specifically identified verb forms.

Appendix Three is not an easy test. For most of us, as in "The Transitive-Verb Surfer," the subject-verb-object sequence is quite familiar and easy to identify, even in multi-clause sentences. Beyond that, however, other kinds of verb-object combinations are bound to give us all of us trouble, not just 7-year-olds. So Appendix Four presents a version of the Gettysburg Address that has all of its verb-objects identified with braces, along with an explanatory section that will equip test takers to be do-it-yourself sentence-comprehension test designers.

The importance, even for adults, of robust sentence-comprehension abilities can be summed up in one phrase: Speed Reading. Apart from word-comprehension questions, all of the reading comprehension tests I've examined focus upon paragraph questions like "what is the main point of the paragraph?" or "which sentence should be in the blank space?" But as most test takers will agree, the best way strategy for handling content-focus questions like then is to engage in high speed reading, jumping very quickly back and forth between paragraph target and specific questions based on that paragraph - much like a waiter making numerous trips between table and kitchen to satisfy a nervous customer.

There's no doubt that reading speed, just like stick shifting, is bound to vary with reading circumstances. A brisk rate of 600 words a minute is certainly far more appropriate for fiction than the slow pace of 60 words per minute we need to study geometry chapter we're going to be tested on. And physically considered, the size of the print is always a factor, along with the number of words per line, to say nothing of our eyesight in a nation where, according to the American Optometric Association, 25% of our K-12 students will some kind of vision care during the school careers.

Optometrists and ophthalmologists, it should be added , are quick to point out that reading requires both visual acuity and language skill, especially sentence comprehension. Practically considered, there's much more to effective high speed reading than recognizing who is doing what to whom in each sentence. But as a basic tool our awareness of "transitivity" can take us very far toward at-a-glance sentence comprehension no matter how old we are.

Next to a small child's pre-speech ability to comprehend complete sentences, I still feel a thrill, often in a library, when I see a solitary reader trying to keep from bursting into laughter at what's on the pages of the book he or she is reading at the moment. To me events like these signal that, for a couple of precious moments at least, the printed page has been almost completely replaced by pure thought itself, almost as though the whole page has jumped into our mind for a short visit - largely with the help of strong and capacious at-a-glance sentence comprehension.

In my experience 7-year-olds are serious no-nonsense folks. If what's here works well for them, maybe it will also work for their older brothers and sisters, along with grandma and grandpa further on down the line.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . There's nothing Un-American about high-speed, high-comprehension reading. In years past magazines like Liberty and Reader's Digest would explicitly indicate exactly how many minutes would be needed to read a specific article (usually about two and a half for a two-column 800-word page), and crossword puzzles did the same. Today, though, reading speeds seem to be a closely guarded professional secret, especially when it comes to online reading (has anyone, repeat, anyone actually read a 300-page book all the way through via computer screen?).

Along the same lines, what should be our expectations regarding reading retention ?. Given the variousness of readers, can we truly expect every sixth grader to remember what Huckleberry Finn's Pa had on the sole of his boot? Could teachers themselves pass the for-credit multiple choice tests they give their students. If, as Bertrand Russell wisely pointed out, "the purpose of education is to cure the patient of the disease of childishness," then it's high time for grown-ups to look at how they themselves actually turn pages and what they expect to get out of it, apart from the frustration of trying to comprehend sentences that come across as typographical blurs.

As I've tried to show, the role of transitive-verb surfer can be both productive and fun. Hence my use of memory- repetoire texts like our National Anthem and the Gettysburg Address as potential parsing targets. Now that senior centers are taking spelling tests and crossword puzzles seriously, a reasonable next step is surely that of asking how many transitive-verb forms appear in the first verses of America, The Beautiful, and God Bless America (itself a great S-V-O opener).

If, from seven on up to seventy and beyond, the limits of our language are the limits of our world, as Wittgenstein put it, our ability as a transitive-verb surfer is fundamentally a survival skill worth taking seriously in personal best terms, not just in little red schoolhouse terms. Here's hoping it gets more attention, and helps bring our reading back up to speed.