Publisher's Synopsis
Somewhere between birth and maturity the highly structured linguistic system characteristic of the adult mind evolves. While young children commonly group words idiosyncratically or according to a thematic principle, adults prove more homogeneous in obeying conceptual categories. A gradual transition between two age extremes and their modes of organizing language can be mapped in detail. The several experiments presented in this volume are designed to tap the growth of appreciation of relations among 20 specific words, though inferences drawn from the data may be applicable to much of the lexicon. Where empirical evidence to date is scant in the area of semantic evolution, Jeremy Anglin establishes the hypothesis that development proceeds from the concrete to the abstract. As tools to survey the architecture of cognitive capacities, he adopts and adapts traditional verbal learning and psycholinguistic techniques and applies them to subj
