Developmental changes in conditional reasoning: Linguistic or logical?

Abstract This study investigated reasoning with abstract conditional sentences as a function of age. Subjects from third-grade to eleventh-grade were required to evaluate the conclusion of several conditional arguments. The results confirmed the previously established finding that performance improves with age, particularly between 11 and 15 years. This finding could be interpreted to indicate that individuals become more logical as they get older. However, another possible interpretation is that the meaning of a conditional sentence like p then q for naive Ss may not always be given by the truth function pq true, p q false, p q true, and p q true. Further analysis suggested that at 9 years individuals treat the connective in the sentence, if p then q, as if it were either a conjunctive or a biconditional, that the conjunctive meaning disappears with increasing age and after 13 years is gradually superceded by the conditional.

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