According to 2-component theories of intelligence, negative cross-sectional age gradients in mechanic (broad Gf) and pragmatic (broad Gc) cognitive components reflect the increasing constraining of the former in the expression and integrity of the latter component. The authors examined this widely held but untested assumption by applying a recently proposed dynamic structural modeling technique...

People demonstrate systematic logical failures when reasoning about conditional statements. In the Wason selection task, a test typically interpreted as a measure of abstract deductive reasoning, only about 10% of participants choose the cards prescribed by deductive logic. One possibility is that people are simply bad at hypothesis testing – biased toward confirming rather than falsifying abst...

This study characterized the profile of pragmatic abilities among 24 children with hearing loss (HL) aged 6.3-9.4 years, 13 using hearing aids (HAs) and 11 using cochlear implants (CIs), in comparison to those of 13 hearing children with similar chronological and language ages. All the children with HL used spoken language, attended regular schools, and received communication therapy twice a we...

In recent years, increasing emphasis has been put on pragmatic competence as part of foreign language curricula. This article analyzes the devices used by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in order to perform the speech act of disagreement in their L2. Data from 27 ESL learners were gathered by means of Discourse Completion Tests and compared to baseline data from 27 native speaker...