Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective

Abstract

This study concerns children's use of cohesive devices in discourse production. A distinction is drawn between 'coherence', the focus of work by story grammarians, and 'cohesion', a more strictly linguistic problem which holds for narrative and non-narrative discourse. The analysis not only covers changes in surface output, but focuses on underlying representations with respect to changes in the organization of linguistic entries in memory outside input-output relations, changes in the internal processes which constrain production of discourse during input-output relations, and the relationship between these two aspects of the development of cohesion.