- LSF ID
- 51793
- Sonstiges
- der Hochschule zugeordnete*r Autor*in
Abstract:
Investigated the pervasiveness of directionality in single relational premises and the hypothesis that there is a general preference for processing the reference object before the target object in several domains of deductive reasoning. In four experiments, a total of 130 college students (mean age 22.8 years) completed sentence-picture verification tasks testing the comprehension of spatial relations, quantified statements, and propositional connectives. In each case, following presentation of a verbal statement, the referents of the terms in the statement were presented pictorially, 1 s apart, in an order congruent or incongruent with the order of terms in the statement. Verification times were found to be faster for congruent display order in some cases, but a reversed or no directionality effect was found in others. In each case, the findings can be explained in terms of a proposed two-step model for the construction of semantic representations of relational statements, in which a reference object is established first and the second object is attached in relation to it.