Pre-readers' assumptions about the stability of written words' meanings Abstract Results of 3 Experiments confirm previous findings that in a moving word task prereaders aged 3-5 years judge as if the meaning of a written word changes when it moves from a matching to a non-matching toy, for example when the word 'dog' moves from a dog to a boat. We explore under what circumstances children make such errors, and identify new conditions under which children were more likely correctly to treat written words' meanings as stable: When the word was placed alongside a non-matching toy without having previously been alongside a matching toy; when two words were moved each from a matching to a non-matching toy; and when children were asked to change what print said. Under these conditions children more frequently assumed physical forms had stable meaning, as they do with other forms of external representation.Keywords: Representation; Meta-language; Written words; Symbols 3 Assumptions about the stability of word meanings Can one written word mean many things?Pre-readers' assumptions about the stability of written words' meanings Over their preschool and early school years, normally developing children show increasing mastery at handling relationships between external representations of various kinds and their referents. A relatively early achievement at around two and a half years is the ability to use photographs, drawings or video recordings to locate hidden objects (DeLoache, 2004;DeLoache & Burns, 1994;Troseth & DeLoache, 1998;Liben, 1999).Later, at around three years of age, children become able to use scale models and simple maps in the same manner (DeLoache, 1991;Liben, 1999;Marzolf & DeLoache, 1994; see also MacConnell & Daehler, 2004). Subsequently, children reveal understanding that photographs or drawings can represent their referents as they looked in the past rather than as they are currently (Robinson, Nye & Thomas, 1994;Thomas, Jolley, Robinson & Champion, 1999;Zaitchik, 1990). In a typical task, children see a drawing or a photograph of an object, and features of the object are then changed. Many 3-year-olds judge as if they believe that the representation (out of sight) has physically changed to stay in match with its real referent. By 4 to 5 years of age few children make this error.Later still, by the age of around 6 to 7 years, children can evaluate as inadequate utterances which under-specify their intended referents (Flavell, Speer, Green & August, 1981;Robinson & Robinson, 1982;Apperly & Robinson, 1998) Furthermore, because written words have conventional generic meaning, we might find theoretically interesting differences in the developmental course of children's mastery of this form of representation in comparison with the others summarized above.In the hiding tasks mentioned children use a picture of a particular room; in standard false picture tasks the picture represents a particular aspect of the world; in tasks involving ambiguous utterances the speaker refers to a specific referent from...

This article addresses the question whether the woman's 'seed' in Genesis 3:15 is an individual (as LXX interprets) or her posterity, by an empirical study of how Biblical Hebrew used its pronouns and verb inflections when they are associated with zera', 'seed', when it has the nuance 'offspring'. Syntactically Genesis 3:15 exhibits the pattern found when zera' refers to an individual. The article concludes with some suggestions for following the exegetical consequences of this syntactical result.

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This study argues that the juxtaposition of Psalms 111-112 offers wisdom for life. Psalm 111, in stressing God's mighty deeds of redemption for his people, focuses on the "big story" for the whole people; Psalm 112, in stressing "wisdom," encourages each member of God's people in a day-to-day walk, a "little story," that contributes to the big story of the whole people.