Less obscure? Pragmatics and 3–4-year-old children's semantics

Young children's understanding of the terms more and less is considered. In a context where a response bias operates in favour of appropriate responses to more, 3–4-year-old children respond to less as they do to more, apparently indicating assimilation of meaning. However, in a context where there is an absence of any response bias, children respond to less at random. Further, young children can respond appropriately to an alternative expression for the concept of lesser amount, doesn't have many. These results suggest that young children's observed difficulties with the term less do not arise from assimilating the meaning of less to that of more. Rather, difficulties with less stem from young children's failure to understand the meaning of that particular term, responses to instructions containing less being determined by pragmatic rather than semantic factors. When the context exhibits a response bias, children's responses to less are in accord with it. When there is no response bias, children guess and respond to less at random.     

Ladies and Gentlemen, Women and Men: A Study of the Connotations of Words Indicating Gender

Lakoff's hypothesis about the connotations of the words "lady" and "woman" was investigated by asking college students to rate these words, as well as the masculine words "gentleman" and "man", on several adjective scales. Ratings indicated that the term "gentleman" implied greater competence and warmth than the word "man", while the term "lady" tended to suggest to raters relatively less competence and less warmth than the term "woman" did. Further, it was found that the more formal term ("gentleman", "lady") regardless of gender was described more positively than the less formal term ("man", "woman") on several scales concerned with goodness, politeness, morality, and femininity. Lakoff's hypothesis that "lady" conveys some unique meanings relative to sex role stereotypes thus received support, although some of the connotations of "lady" appear to be due to implied formality rather than to gender features. The degree to which feminine terms were differentiated by raters could be predicted to some extent on the basis of rater characteristics; no significant prediction was possible for the masculine terms.