Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

Several observations about the way humans conceive of attributes, changes, and covariation of stimuli are presented as indications for the existence of a conceptual hierarchy of dimensions in which time dominates space, and space dominates every other dimension. (Author)

College students learned artificial grammar under two conditions: paired associate learning (PA), and observation of exemplars (OBS). OBS induced abstract representation of the rules of grammar. PA produced very different learning--subjects knew some whole items but detected little structure. Grammar was learned largely by analogy rather than…

Three experiments using university students explored what constitutes an event and what determines its boundaries. Results supported the hypothesis that sequences of stimuli repeating in different contexts are cut out to become cognitive entities ("things" with a beginning and an end) in their own right. Results suggest that the…