Showing papers by "Ira A. Noveck published in 2004"
TL;DR: The authors showed that participants are less accurate and take significantly longer to answer correctly when instructions call for a Some but not all interpretation rather than a Some and possibly all interpretation, and that the rate of scalar inferences increased as permitted response time did.
436 citations
TL;DR: This paper found a left lateralized parietal frontal network for both inference forms with increasing activation when reasoning becomes more challenging by way of Modus Tollens, which is consistent with Goel and Dolan (2003) and cast doubt upon accounts of reasoning that accord primary inferential processes uniquely to either the right hemisphere or to language areas.
98 citations
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: The authors used the term implicature to describe the pragmatic inference linking word meanings to speaker's meanings and laid the foundations for nearly all of the linguistic-pragmatic studies found in this volume.
Abstract: Paul Grice was concerned with the way logical terms such as some, or and and take on extralogical meanings in conversational contexts. To take one example, Grice (1989) described or as having a weak word meaning identical to formal logic’s inclusive disjunction (which is false only in the case where both disjuncts are) but as conveying in conversation a speaker’s stronger meaning corresponding to the exclusive disjunction (which is false in the case where both disjuncts are false and where both are true). Grice used the term implicature to describe the pragmatic inference linking word meanings to speaker’s meanings and laid the foundations for nearly all of the linguistic-pragmatic studies found in this volume.1
43 citations
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: These findings show that the previous findings with more complex Aristotlean syllogisms are robust and cast doubt upon accounts of reasoning that accord primary inferential processes uniquely to either the right hemisphere or to language areas.
Abstract: Behavioral predictions about reasoning have usually contrasted two accounts, Mental Logic and Mental Models. Neuroimaging techniques have been providing new measures that transcend this debate. We tested a hypothesis from Goel and Dolan (2003) that predicts neural activity predominantly in a left parietal-frontal system when participants reason with arbitrary (non-meaningful) materials. In an event-related fMRI investigation, we employed propositional syllogisms, the majority of which involved conditional reasoning. While investigating conditional reasoning generally, we ultimately focused on the neural activity linked to the two valid conditional forms — Modus Ponens (If p then q; p//q) and Modus Tollens (If p then q; not-q//not-p). Consistent with Goel and Dolan (2003), we found a left lateralized parietal frontal network for both inference forms with increasing activation when reasoning becomes more challenging by way of Modus Tollens. These findings show that the previous findings with more complex Aristotlean syllogisms are robust and cast doubt upon accounts of reasoning that accord primary inferential processes uniquely to either the right hemisphere or to language areas.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this article, les enfants, meme les plus jeunes, ne sont pas limites dans leurs capacites pragmatiques, qu'ils sont aptes a faire ce type d'inferences and que leurs mauvaises performances s'expliquent par le role fondamental que joue l'effort dans la production d'implicatures.
Abstract: Certaines inferences pragmatiques liees a des items lexicaux particuliers sont traitees differemment par les enfants et par les adultes. Il s'agit des implicatures scalaires, qui nous amenent, par exemple, a interpreter certains comme signifiant pas tous, et de l'enrichissement pragmatique de et en et puis. Les adultes font les implicatures liees aux termes scalaires et a la conjonction alors que les enfants les interpretent avec leur sens litteral, apparaissant ainsi plus logiques que les adultes. Nous montrerons que les enfants, meme les plus jeunes, ne sont pas limites dans leurs capacites pragmatiques, qu'ils sont aptes a faire ce type d'inferences et que leurs mauvaises performances s'expliquent par le role fondamental que joue l'effort dans la production d'implicatures.
9 citations