Micro- and macrodevelopmental changes in language acquisition and other representational systems

Abstract

In this paper, it will be argued that each time a procedure in a representational system is functioning adequately and automatically, the child steps up to a metaprocedural level and considers the procedure as a unit in its own right. Data will be drawn from microdevelopment in children's creation of external memory devices (i.e., changes in representation of a spatial task during a one hour's session) as well as from macrodevelopment in language acquisition (i.e., changes occurring over age in a study of nominal determiners, pronouns and gender markers). These two aspects of development of representational systems are examined with respect to the spontaneous passage from concrete reference to abstract systems, from idiosyncratic to conventional notations, from redundant to economic marking, from unifunctional to plurifunctional meaningful units. These micro- and macrodevelopmental changes take place in a spontaneous fashion despite the fact that the child's earlier system is adequate for successfully conveying the information required. A discussion will be made of the way in which children tend to indicate externally, by unifunctional markers, information which was implicit in their earlier use of an adult-like system. They appear to be striving for the delicate balance between encoding and decoding efforts, ultimately leading to a felicitous representational system. Metaprocedural behavior is hypothesized to act as a control mechanism in the striving for this delicate balance of information content and information processing effort. It also appears to act as a control mechanism for the interprocedural organization of what was previously a plethora of juxtaposed, unconnected procedures yielding superficially analogous behavior. The stepping-up to a metaprocedural level seems to occur each time the child has a handle on his currently functioning, goal-oriented system. This enables the child to treat the system, or procedures which are part thereof, as units functioning in their own right. Thus there appears to be a deep-rooted psychological tendency for a representational tool which functions well procedurally to become subsequently a problem-space per se.