Syllogistic reasoning in varied narrative contexts: Aspects of logical and linguistic development

This experimental study examined the effects on syllogistic reasoning in grades 6 and 12 of certain contextual narrative variables. The experimental task consisted of 27 varied syllogistic problems based on information contained in three narrative texts—a fantasy passage, a realistic passage, and a contractual passage. Versions of these texts were constructed for each group reading level. Analysis of the data revealed several significant interactions between subject groups and treatment variables. In particular, younger subjects performed better than grade 12 subjects on problems following the fantasy narrative, while the older subjects did better with the other two passages. The results suggest that some orthodox views about concrete-versus formal-operational reasoning abilities and about the distinction between abstract and concrete materials need to be reassessed within a discourse-processing framework that is sensitive to the discourse worlds in which problems are embedded.The author wishes to acknowledge the support of an Isaak Walton Killam Doctoral Scholarship for this research.     

Perception of movement in American Sign Language: Effects of linguistic structure and linguistic experience

In order to reveal the psychological representation of movement from American Sign Language (ASL), deaf native signers and hearing subjects unfamiliar with sign were asked to make triadic comparisons of movements that had been isolated from lexical and from grammatically inflected signs. An analysis of the similarity judgments revealed a small set of physically specifiable dimensions that accounted for most of the variance. The dimensions underlying the perception of lexical movement were in general different from those underlying inflectional movement, for both groups of subjects. Most strikingly, deaf and hearing subjects significantly differed in their patterns of dimensional salience for movements, both at the lexical and at the inflectional levels. Linguistically relevant dimensions were of increased salience to native signers. The difference in perception of linguistic movement by native signers and by naive observers demonstrates that modification of natural perceptual categories after language acquisition is not bound to a particular transmission modality, but rather can be a more general consequence of acquiring a formal linguistic system.     

The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure

In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.We would like to thank Susanne Tunstall for providing linguistic judgments in the corpus analyses reported in Sec. 3.3. We also wish to thank the following people for helpful, comments and discussions on earlier presentations of this paper: the audience at the Eighth Human Sentence Processing Conference, in Tucson Arizona, Maria Babyonyshev, Tom Bever, Martin Corley, Danny Fox, Don Mitchell, Edson Miyamoto, Janet Nicol, Colin Phillips, Gregg Solomon, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, James Thomas, and Tom Wasow. All remaining errors are our own. The second author was supported by the Research Training Grant Language: Acquisition and Computation awarded by the National Science Foundation (U.S.) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (DIR 9113607), and by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Employee commitment in context: The nature and implication of commitment profiles

It is well established that employee commitment can take different forms (e.g., affective, normative, and continuance), yet it is only recently that theory has been advanced to explain how these different forms combine to influence behavior (Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001). We tested this theory with data from employees in three human services organizations (N = 403). Using latent profile analyses, we identified six distinct profile groups and found that they differed on measures of need satisfaction, regulation, affect, engagement, organizational citizenship behavior, and well-being. The observed differences are consistent with the notion that a commitment profile provides a context that determines how the individual components are experienced (Gellatly, Meyer, & Luchak, 2006). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this context effect.     

Factor structure of work commitment for Japanese employees

The factor structure of the Japanese translation of five work commitment measures, i.e., the Work Involvement Questionnaire, the Career Commitment Scale, the Job Involvement Questionnaire, the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, and the Work Group Attachment Scale, was examined in 496 Japanese employees. Exploratory factor analysis clearly identified five factors which reflected commitment toward the job, organization, work group, career, and work itself. The items composing each factor were consistent with the items included in each of the five measures used.     

The logical study of science

The relation between logic and philosophy of science, often taken for granted, is in fact problematic. Although current fashionable criticisms of the usefulness of logic are usually mistaken, there are indeed difficulties which should be taken seriously — having to do, amongst other things, with different scientific mentalities in the two disciplines (section 1). Nevertheless, logic is, or should be, a vital part of the theory of science. To make this clear, the bulk of this paper is devoted to the key notion of a scientific theory in a logical perspective. First, various formal explications of this notion are reviewed (section 2), then their further logical theory is discussed (section 3). In the absence of grand inspiring programs like those of Klein in mathematics or Hilbert in metamathematics, this preparatory ground-work is the best one can do here. The paper ends on a philosophical note, discussing applicability and merits of the formal approach to the study of science (section 4).I would like to thank David Pearce and Veikko Rantala for their helpful comments.