Object substitutions in play (e.g. using a box as a car) are strongly linked to language learning and their absence is a diagnostic marker of language delay. Classic accounts posit a symbolic function that underlies both words and object substitutions. Here we show that object substitutions depend on developmental changes in visual object recognition: 18- to 30-month old children (n = 63) subst...

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the n...

Most present day simulation languages use ASCII characters for representation of models. ASCII characters are chosen, because of the requirements of present day computer implementations. In mathematics, on the other hand, symbolic representations are common place, because of better readability. In this article, the χ specification language is presented. The language is used for specification, s...

Using a symbolic dynamics and a surrogate data approach, we show that the language exhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila ('D.') during courtship is as grammatically complex as the most complex human-spoken modern languages. This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visually frame-by-frame dissected into 37 fun...

The purposes of this study were to investigate (a) whether children in families with a positive history of dyslexia were more likely to show delays in language development than children without family risk and (b) whether a delayed onset of expressive language (late talking) predicted later language development. We analyzed the language development of 200 children longitudinally at 14, 24, 30, ...

This paper outlines the epigenetic logic of the emergence and elaboration of symbolization. The account is based upon considerations arising from the study of the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of symbolic communication, abstraction from which yields generalizations regarding the necessary developmental pre-requisites for the capacity for symbolization and the processes of the elaboration of symb...

In this paper we present the concepts of drawn symbolic picture and symbolic picture. Such notions have been conceived as an extension of the concept of drawn pictures which was introduced by Maurer, Rozenberg and Welzl [31]. We provide a string description of such pictures. It consists of alternating words, i.e. strings whose letters are in alternation from an alphabet of symbols and an alphab...

Formal specifications provide strong bases for testing and bring powerful techniques and technologies. Expressive formal specification languages combine large data domain and behavior. Thus, symbolic methods have raised particular interest for test generation techniques. Integrating formal testing in proof environments such as Isabelle/HOL is referred to as “theorem-prover based testing”. Theor...

The concurrent functional language Erlang [1] has a number of distinguishing features, like dynamic typing, concurrency via asynchronous message passing or hot code loading, that make it especially appropriate for distributed, faulttolerant, soft real-time applications. The success of Erlang is witnessed by the increasing number of its industrial applications. For instance, Erlang has been used...