The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases. Results showed: (1) syntagmatic processing of sentences declined with age, while paradigmatic, paraphrastic processing increased; (2) the effect of imaginal similarity upon semantic processing also declined, but was present at all ages; (3) lexical factors were more salient than syntactic factors and developmentally affected processing strategies; younger children focused upon individual words and made lexical substitutions while older children focused upon the entire set of content words in a sentence and made syntactic rearrangements; and (4) psycholinguistic demands affected information loss. Taken together, these findings integrate and extend previous developmental studies and studies of metalinguistics, and illustrate the Piagetian concept of decalage and the Brunerian concept of iconicity. (Author/AMH)