In response to Roger Brown's memorial tribute to Eric Lenneberg, (Cognition, June, 1976), the author disagrees with Brown's conclusion that a Whorfian interpretation of both Lenneberg's and his own results regarding the problem of codability and the recognition of colors, is no longer valid. (Author/MV)

Brown addresses Schonbach's criticism (previous article) of Brown's tribute to Lenneberg (Cognition, June 1976). Brown reviews various research on codability, recognition, and memory of color names; and encourages the development of new generalizations. Although Whorfian hypotheses are appropriate for studying semantic differences, they have not…

Human infants are predisposed to organize their experience in terms of certain concepts (natural) and not others (unnatural). Three formal, necessary conditions on the naturalness of concepts are offered. The conditions attempt to link the problem of naturalness to principled distinctions between sense vs nonsense, simplicity vs complexity, and…

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language which focuses on the conflicting interaction of principles determining language organization. Principles of structural and perceptual nature are in conflict in language of the Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) type, because of the relative clause construction. Theoretical and empirical evidence…