Abstract
Children in Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8 were tested on their ability to comprehend and categorize stimuli involving eight logical connectives: conjunction, disjunction, conditional, biconditional, and their negatives. Three distinct groupings of difficulty were apparent. The easy group of connectives (negative implication, negative disjunction, and conjunction) had the common factor of being verbalized with the connective “and.” The second group, showing a definite developmental trend, consisted of the negative biconditional and the disjunctive, which shared the common factor of being verbalized with the connective “or.” The third group revealed an almost total failure to understand implication and biconditional, verbalized with “if,” as well as difficulty in handling the negative conjunctive which verbalizes as a disjunction of negatives. Results were considered to support Bourne’s hypothesis of an intuitive truth-table approach to multiple rule learning rather than Neisser and Weene’s postulation of a hierarchy of difficulty levels.
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Shine, D., Walsh, J.F. Developmental trends in the use of logical connectives. Psychon Sci 23, 171–172 (1971). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336061
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336061