This report presents a summary of the research designed to develop a psycholinguistics of comprehension and memory for meaningful written prose paragraphs. The approach departs from most previous ones by seeking to formulate an explicit theory, instead of relying on informal qualitative judgments as to paragraph structure, the scoring of data, and…

On the basis of experimental data, the author makes the following observations: (1) the basic encoding processes in speech, the schemas of order, first produce elementary underlying sentences; (2) underlying sentence structure is the controlling step in the organization of speech; (3) underlying sentence structure plays a central role in…

"How does a child come to be able to relate his own experience to the formal means of communicating about that experience in the language to which he is exposed?" The author maintains that the innate predispositions that underlie the development of the cognitive ability to organize and structure experience also underlie the acquisition of the…