The research reported here focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis: relexification; reanalysis; dialect levelling; and parameter setting. The role of these processes in creole genesis is documented in a detailed comparison of Haitian Creole with two of its major source languages: French, its main lexifier language, and Fongbe, one of its West African substratum languages. Chapter topics include: the complex process of creole genesis and linguistic theory; cognitive processes involved in creole genesis; background and methodology of the current study; functional category lexical entries involved in nominal structure; the preverbal markers encoding relative tense, mood, and aspect; pronouns; functional category lexical entries involved in the structure of the clause; the determiner and the structure of the clause; the syntactic properties of verbs; relexification of derivational affixes; concatenation of words into compounds; parameters; an evaluation of the hypothesis; and theoretical consequences. Appended materials include a list of available Haitian Creole texts from 1776-1936, notes on phonemic inventories and orthographic conventions, and a sample of non-matching derived words in Haitian and French. A list of abbreviations and indexes of authors, language/language families, and subjects are also included. (MSE)