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Modes Of Representation, The Epistemic Subject And Developmental Word Association Phenomena, Ellen M. Gerschitz

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This study was devised to investigate the developmental syntagmaticparadigmatic word association shift. In syntagmatic associations the stimulus and associative response are of different grammatical form classes and appear to be grammatically continuous, as response may follow stimulus in an utterance (e.g. cat-meows). These are the predominant responses of children before the ages of six to eight. Older children and adults shift to making paradigmatic associations in which stimulus and response are from the same form class and may be substituted for one another in an utterance (e.g. cat-dog). This shift was explained in terms of underlying symbolic mediational processes and …