In the context of an analytical geometry, this study considers the mathematical understanding and activity of seven students analyzed simultaneously through two knowledge frameworks: (1) the Van Hiele levels (Van Hiele, 1986, 1999) and register and domain knowledge (Hibert, 1988); and (2) three action frameworks: the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs, 1999;…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects…

The study examined the relation of language use and logical thought to social experience with both age and class held constant. The primary assumptions under study were: that the logic of symbolic grouping was highly sensitive to a child's experience with the objects to which that logic was applied; that the existence of diglossia in a bilingual…