What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.     

A measurement model of women's behavioral risk taking.

The current study was designed to gain a better understanding of the nature of the relationship between substance use and sexual risk taking within a community sample of women (N = 1,004). Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors examined the factor structure of sexual risk behaviors and substance use to determine whether they are best conceptualized as domains underlying a single, higher order, risk-taking propensity. A 2 higher order factor model (sexual risk behavior and substance use) provided the best fit to the data, suggesting that these 2 general risk domains are correlated but independent factors. Sensation seeking had large general direct effects on the 2 risk domains and large indirect effects on the 4 first-order factors and the individual indicators. Negative affect had smaller, yet still significant, effects. Impulsivity and anxiety were unrelated to sexual health risk domains.     

Mental representation of logical connectives

Logical connectives, such as “AND”, “OR”, “IF . . . THEN”, and “IF AND ONLY IF” are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a “minimalist” one-possibility representation. As a result, connectives denoting a single possibility (e.g., conjunctions) are likely to be represented correctly, whereas connectives denoting multiple possibilities (e.g., disjunctions or conditionals) are likely to be erroneously represented as conjunctions. These predictions were tested and confirmed in three experiments using different paradigms. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a multiple-choice task and asked to select all and only those possibilities that would indicate that compound verbal propositions were true versus false. In Experiment 2, a somewhat similar task was used, except that participants were asked later to perform a cued recall of verbal propositions. Finally, Experiment 3 used an old/new recognition paradigm to examine participants' ability to accurately recognize different logical connectives. The results of the three experiments are discussed in relation to theories of representation of possibilities and theories of reasoning.