Default meanings: language’s logical connectives between comprehension and reasoning

Young Children's Comprehension of Logical Connectives

A Logical Framework for Default Reasoning

This paper presents a simple logical framework for default reasoning. The semantics is normal first order model theory; instead of changing the logic, the way in which the logic is used is changed. Rather than expecting reasoning to be just deduction (in any logic) from our knowledge, we examine the consequences of viewing reasoning as a very simple case of theory formation. By treating default...

Reasoning from connectives and relations between entities

This article reports investigations of inferences that depend both on connectives between clauses, such as or else, and on relations between entities, such as in the same place as. Participants made more valid inferences from biconditionals--for instance, Ann is taller than Beth if and only if Beth is taller than Cath--than from exclusive disjunctions (Exp. 1). They made more valid transitive i...

Mental representation of logical connectives.

Logical connectives, such as "AND", "OR", "IF. THEN", and "IF AND ONLY IF" are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a "minimalist" one-possibility representation. As a res...

How logical reasoning mediates the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension.

The present study aimed to examine the role of logical reasoning in the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension in 146 fourth grade Dutch children. We assessed their standardized reading comprehension measure, along with their decoding efficiency and vocabulary as measures of lexical quality, syllogistic reasoning as measure of (verbal) logical reasoning, and nonverbal reason...