The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

The theory that reduction transformations provide speakers with the option of deleting redundant information when communicating to a topic-cognizant audience is supported. In the experiment, college physiology students were provided with deep structure proximal sentences (base propositions), and asked to communicate them to different audiences,…

The authors respond to Dresher and Hornstein's article (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December, 1976) on artificial intelligence (AI). The dispute between linguistic theorists and AI researchers is based upon their different aims; while AI researchers develop programs capable of intelligent behavior, transformational linguists study the characteristics…

If the basic operations hypothesis (EJ 184 227) is interpreted as a general principle governing acquisition of all movement rules, it may obscure the fact that children distinguish between unbounded and local rules. Error patterns support this distinction, lending credence to theories with separate status for the two rule types. (Author/RD)