Linguistic Forms as Markers of Automatic Entailments in a Problem Solving Task

The thinking aloud verbal protocol of a 10 year- old, solving the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, was analysed in the line of Ericsson and Simon, enriched by some ideas from cognitive linguistics, notably Culioli´s enunciative theory. The basic enunciative operation of location, close to Langacker ´s approach of reference point, was cognitively interpreted as an automatic entailment putting information into perspective. Then, applied to consecutive actions, it allowed to exhibit the construction of representational aggregates. The cognitive interpretation of Starting Term, whose marker is anaphora, allowed to distinguish the internal space from the external space, and micro-processes characterizing their interaction. The main result shows mechanisms of the construction of holistic chunks, and of the generalization of constraints.