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When is a conclusion worth deriving? We claim that a conclusion is worth deriving to the extent that it is relevant in the sense of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). To support this hypothesis, we experiment with "indeterminate relational problems" where we ask participants what, if anything, follows from premises such as A is taller than B, A is taller than C. With such problems, the indeterminate response that nothing follows is common, and we explain why. We distinguish several types of determinate conclusions and show that their rate is a function of their relevance. We argue that by appropriately changing the formulation of the premises, the relevance of determinate conclusions can be increased, and the rate of indeterminate responses thereby reduced. We contrast these relevance-based predictions with predictions based on linguistic congruence.

Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori teacher training. Cross-sectional analyses in kindergarten (N = 176; M[subscript age] = 5-6) and longitudinal analyses over the 3 years of preschool (N = 70; M[subscript age] = 3-6) showed that the adapted Montessori curriculum was associated with outcomes comparable to the conventional curriculum on math, executive functions, and social skills. However, disadvantaged kindergarteners from Montessori classrooms outperformed their peers on reading (d = 0.68). This performance was comparable to that of advantaged children from an accredited Montessori preschool.

Recent research has shown that by the age of 4, preschool children tend to associate social power with the male gender. The present study examined this association with a group of children from a Maya community in Guatemala, where gender inequalities are high, and tested the prediction that a strong gender hierarchy reduces girls' perception of themselves as being dominant in dyadic power situations. However, contrary to our predictions, we did not find that children associated power with the male gender. In Experiment 1, we asked 4 to 7 years-old children (N = 70) to identify themselves with a dominant or subordinate character in same-gender and mixed-gender relationships. In contrast, to what was previously observed with French children, the results showed no significant difference between male and female participants, both of whom strongly identified with the dominant character. In Experiment 2, we asked 4 to 6 years-old participants (N = 70) to assign a gender to a dominant and subordinate character and found a strong own-gender effect, with all participants, males and females, assigning their own gender to the powerful character. Again, this contrasts with previous findings indicating that children from France, Norway and Lebanon did consistently associate power with the male gender. The absence of a male-power association in Maya children is discussed in terms of cultural differences regarding exposure to gender stereotypes, power values and representations of female-male comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments with preschoolers (36 to 78 months) and 8-year-old children (Experiment 1, N = 173; Experiment 2, N = 132) investigated the development of children's resource distribution in dominance contexts. On the basis of the distributive justice literature, 2 opposite predictions were tested. Children could match resource allocation with the unequal social setting they observe and thus favor a dominant individual over a subordinate 1. Alternatively, children could choose to compensate the subordinate if they consider that the dominance asymmetry should be counteracted. Two experiments using a giving task (Experiment 1) and a taking task (Experiment 2) led to the same results. In both experiments, children took dominance into account when allocating resources. Moreover, their distributive decisions were similarly affected by age: Although 3- and 4-year-old children favored the dominant individual, 5-year-old children showed no preference and 8-year-old children strongly favored the subordinate. Several mechanisms accounting for this developmental pattern are discussed.

A series of four experiments investigated preschoolers' abilities to make sense of dominance relations. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as early as 3 years old, preschoolers are able to infer dominance not only from physical supremacy but also from decision power, age, and resources. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that preschoolers have expectations regarding the ways in which a dominant and a subordinate individual are likely to differ. In particular, they expect that an individual who imposes his choice on another will exhibit higher competence in games and will have more resources.

This study investigates the ERP components associated with the processing of words that are critical to generating and rejecting deductive conditional Modus Ponens arguments ("If P then Q; P//"Therefore, "Q"). The generation of a logical inference is investigated by placing a verb in the minor premise that matches the one used in the antecedent of the conditional premise so that the inference can be carried out ("If John is sleeping then he is snoring; John is sleeping"). Rejections are examined by placing verbs that are associates of the verb that would make the conclusion valid (Conclusion "therefore John is dreaming" in the example above). The inference generation phase was characterized by two ERP components, namely the P3b and the PSW. Rejections were associated with an N2 and a late positive component. The implications of these results regarding the processing of words in an inferential context are discussed. (Contains 5 figures.)

Conditional reasoning consists in combining a conditional premise with a categorical premise and inferring a conclusion from them. Two well-known conditional arguments are Modus Ponens (MP: "If P then Q; P//"therefore Q), which is logically valid and Affirmation of the Consequent (AC: "If P then Q; Q//"therefore "P"), which is not. The latter is often accepted as true on pragmatic grounds under the generally accepted assumption that the conditional premise is transformed so as to justify a biconditional reading ("p if-and-only-if q"). We present results from two experiments--one using self-paced measures and the other electroencephalography (EEG)--while comparing participants' evaluations of MP and AC arguments. Based on prior work, we anticipated finding two types of individuals as a function of their endorsing or rejecting AC arguments. The self-paced task (Experiment 1) shows that "Rejecters" of AC arguments are linked to especially long response times with respect to "Endorsers" and, critically, shows that AC argument's minor premise prompts slowdowns among all participants compared to MP's. The EEG study (Experiment 2) reveals that the minor premise in AC arguments prompts both Rejecters and Endorsers to produce an N200 wave, which the literature associates with a violation of expectations. These findings suggest that the second premise of AC arguments arrives unexpectedly even among those who are ultimately Endorsers. We describe how these findings impact the conditional reasoning literature. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

Conditional reasoning studies typically involve presenting a major conditional premise ("If P then Q"), a minor premise (P) and a conclusion (Q). We describe how most fMRI studies investigate reasoning and point out that these studies neglect to take into consideration the temporal sequence of cognitive steps generated by the interaction of the premises. The present study uses EEG to address this issue and compares the processing of the minor premise P when it is presented before vs. after the conditional statement ("P[underscored]; If P then Q" vs. "If P then Q; P[underscored]"). When the minor premise comes after the conditional statement and matches the antecedent its processing results in a P3b component, known to reflect the satisfaction of expectations, and in two later components, a PSW component and a CNV component. These two components are discussed in light of a conclusion generation phase and a maintenance phase. We also investigated the effect of violating expectations through the presentation of a minor premise that mismatches the antecedent of the conditional statement ("If P then Q; R[underscored]"). The data indicate that the processing of such a premise yields an N2 component which is known to reflect perceptual conflict. (Contains 5 figures.)

We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne circles) that constitutes a semantic representation, these concepts can also be expressed syntactically in the form of algebraic formulas. We hypothesized that the quantified sentences have an abstract underlying representation common to the formulas and their associated sets of diagrams (models). We derived 9 predictions (3 semantic, 2 pragmatic, and 4 mixed) regarding people's assessment of how well each of the 5 diagrams expresses the meaning of each of the quantified sentences. We report the results from 3 experiments using Gergonne's (1817) circles or an adaptation of Leibniz (1903/1988) lines as external representations and show them to support the predictions.

Literature on relational reasoning mainly focuses on the performance question. It is typically argued that problem difficulty relies on the number of ''mental models'' compatible with the problem. However, no study has ever investigated the wording of conclusions that participants formulate. In the present work, we analyze the relational terms that people use in drawing conclusions from spatial relation problems (A is to the left of B, B is to the left C, D is in front of A, E is in front C, What is the relation between D and E?). We observed a general preference for expressing conclusions with "left" rather than conclusions with "right." We also found that three factors had an influence on the wording of the conclusions: the linguistic form of premises, the question type and the presentation format. On the other hand, the number of models and premise order did not affect the wording of conclusions. Our study shows that the type of conclusion produced provides a new key to identifying the mental processes involved in spatial reasoning. Implications for the two main approaches to reasoning processes (i.e. the analogical and the propositional approaches) are discussed.

Si certaines formes de communication implicite comme les implicatures scalaires ont été l’objet d’un nombre considérable d’études chez les monolingues, peu d’études ont été menées sur les capacités pragmatiques des apprenants de langue seconde (L2). Les seules données disponibles proviennent de l’étude de Slabakova (2010) qui a montré qu’ils sont plus pragmatiques lorsqu’ils interprètent un terme scalaire dans leur L2 que des monolingues. Cependant, des problèmes méthodologiques couplés à des conclusions qui ignorent les données empiriques sur le traitement cognitif des implicatures scalaires remettent en question la réplicabilité des résultats. Nous avons utilisé le même paradigme expérimental que Slabakova (2010) mais en le rendant méthodologiquement plus satisfaisant et nous avons demandé à deux groupes d’apprenants L2 de langue maternelle française d’accomplir une tâche de vérification de phrase. Après un court contexte ils devaient juger une phrase sous-informative basée sur l’échelle scalaire . Les apprenants de L2 ont été testés dans leurs deux langues et comparés à une population de monolingues français. Les résultats de Slabakova (2010) ont été répliqués puisque nos apprenants de L2 font plus l’inférence dans leur L2 que les monolingues. Nos résultats montrent également que les apprenants de L2 font plus d’implicatures dans leur L1 que des monolingues de même L1. Il semblerait donc que le fait d’apprendre une langue étrangère ait un impact sur notre manière de communiquer, non seulement en L2 mais également en L1.