Piaget's research on the processes and products of cognitive and representational development in early childhood is employed to outline the bases of early language development. The processes of assimilation and accommodation, leading to horizontal decalage; empirical and reflective abstraction, resulting in schemas and schemes; as well as…

Suggests that cumulative dynamic analysis of the semantic structure of the incoming message is subconsciously performed by interpreters. (Author/RL)

Native users of American Sign Language manipulated sentences in four ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. Hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences were highly similar across tasks. (Author/RD)

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

A taxonomy of revision changes was developed and applied to 18 case studies of writers' revisions. Subjects were six inexperienced student-writers, six advanced student-writers, and six expert adult-writers. The primary distinction of the taxonomy was between surface (formal and meaning-preserving) revisions and text-base (microstructure and…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…

Argues that the nature of mental representation contributes little to the specification of synchronic syntactic competence. Psycholinguists, syntacticians, and morphologists can benefit from a collaborative approach to the construction of an integrative model of language and mind, covering competence, representation, processing, and acquisition.…

The question is addressed whether a child would develop a communication system if a conventional linguistic model is absent. Six congenitally deaf children, who were not exposed to Sign Language, were observed and videotaped at play in their homes at intervals of one to three months. The children ranged in age from 1 year, 5 months to 4 years, 1…