A Gestalt Theory Approach to Structure in Language.

The fact that human language is highly structured and that, moreover, the way it is structured shows striking similarities in the world's languages has been addressed from two different perspectives. The first, and more traditional, generative hypothesis is that the similarities are due to an innate language faculty. There is an inborn 'grammar' with universal principles that manifest themselves in each language and cross-linguistic variation arises due to a different parameter setting of universal principles.

Sequence influence on the organization of meaningless serial stimuli: economy after all.

This article provides evidence for an extension of structural information theory, a theory which describes perceptual organization formally, into a more general theory of representation that takes the role of organizations obtained earlier into account. In eight experiments, subjects study series of colored dots. Each series contained 6-8 dots of different colors, and viewing time was between 400 ms and 60 s.

Analysis of ambiguity in visual pattern completion.

It is possible to construct an ambiguous line drawing representing several objects partly hidden behind another object. This article deals with two problems: (a) What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for ambiguity to occur? (b) How can the response frequencies of the completions of ambiguous drawings be explained? Whether completions occur or not, the predictions based on the coding theory, better termed the structural information theory, have been discussed in a previous article (Buffart, Leeuwenberg, & Restle, 1981). It is shown here that the theory also specifies the conditions for ambiguity to occur.

Coding theory of visual pattern completion.

It is possible to construct a line drawing that represents one object partly hidden behind another, and most subjects complete the interrupted figure and see the hidden object as whole. This article is addressed to two problems: (a) What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for such figural completion to occur, and (b) exactly what will be seen behind the occluding figure---that is, what completion will be made? Leeuwenberg's coding model for line drawings was used to analyze a number of such figures, along with the hypothesis that figural completion occurs whenever it results in a simplification of final code of the whole figure. Data from previous experiments along with results from two new experimental studies were collected and shown to agree with this hypothesis.