Publisher Summary This chapter describes the development of verbally-labeled semantic relations in childhood. The samples included in the chapter are located within the age span between five and eight years, a developmental stage of forced structural changes in cognition. The comprehension of the data is bound to some suppositions. Semantic relations indicate a special organization of mnestic material stressing the moment of meaning in sensumotoric and iconic memory and in verbal memory. The comprehension of meaning is a process of identification carried out by a memory structure on the basis of sensory stimulation and leading to an output of motivational evaluation. Semantic relations accentuate perceivable and predictable relations between things, human beings, and actions. It illustrates that subjective meaning reflects the objective value in use of objects and persons to the benefit of life insurance and control, this in a wide sense, directly or indirectly. There are many possibilities of classifying semantic relations; differentiated into interconceptual and intraconceptual semantic relations. Intraconceptual relations are bound to marks, attributes, features; they stress relations between properties of objects as a basis of semantic order. Interconceptual relations describe situational, spatial, and temporal constellations of meaning, “semantic kernels” of memory structuring experienced events.

H. Sydow

Papers

The Development of Semantic Relations in Childhood