Persisting Effects of Instruction on Young Children's Syllogistic Reasoning with Incongruent and Abstract Premises

Studies of reasoning have often invoked a distinction between a natural or ordinary consideration of the premises, in which they are interpreted, and even distorted, in the light of empirical knowledge, and an analytic or logical consideration of the premises, in which they are analysed in a literal fashion for their logical implications. Two or three years of schooling have been seen as critical for the spontaneous use of analytic reasoning. In two experiments, however, 4-year-olds who were given brief instructions that prompted use of an analytic approach continued to adopt this approach one week later. Thus, when given syllogistic problems in which the major premise was incongruent with their empirical knowledge (e.g. “All snow is black”), instructed children reasoned more accurately from that premise both immediately and a week later as compared to children given only a basic introduction. A third experiment showed that instructions also improved 4-year-olds' performance on hard-to-imagine, abstract material (e.g. “All mib is white”). Similarities between the effects of brief instruction and of schooling are discussed.     

Counterfactual syllogistic reasoning in normal 4-year-olds, children with learning disabilities, and children with autism

Instruction encouraging imagery improves logical reasoning with counterfactual premises by normal preschool children. In contrast, children with autism have been reported to reason accurately with counterfactual premises in the absence of such instruction (F. J. Scott, S. Baron-Cohen, & A. M. Leslie, 1999). To investigate this pattern of findings, we compared the performance of children with autism, children with learning disabilities, and normally developing 4-year-olds, who were given reasoning problems both with and without instruction in two separate testing sessions 2 to 3 weeks apart. Overall, instruction to use imagery led to persistent logical performance. However, children with autism displayed a distinctive pattern of responding, performing around chance levels, showing a simple response bias, and rarely justifying their responses by elaborating on the premises. We propose that instruction boosts logical performance by clarifying the experimenter's intention that a false proposition be accepted as a basis for reasoning and that children with autism have difficulty grasping this intention.     

Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms

An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language-based learning disabilities. The purpose of this study is to determine if performance on infant information processing measures designed to tap RAP and global processing skills differ as a function of family history of specific language impairment (SLI) and/or the particular demand characteristics of the paradigm used. Seventeen 6- to 9-month-old infants from families with a history of specific language impairment (FH+) and 29 control infants (FH-) participated in this study. Infants' performance on two different RAP paradigms (head-turn procedure [HT] and auditory-visual habituation/recognition memory [AVH/RM]) and on a global processing task (visual habituation/recognition memory [VH/RM]) was assessed at 6 and 9 months. Toddler language and cognitive skills were evaluated at 12 and 16 months. A number of significant group differences were seen: FH+ infants showed significantly poorer discrimination of fast rate stimuli on both RAP tasks, took longer to habituate on both habituation/recognition memory measures, and had lower novelty preference scores on the visual habituation/recognition memory task. Infants' performance on the two RAP measures provided independent but converging contributions to outcome. Thus, different mechanisms appear to underlie performance on operantly conditioned tasks as compared to habituation/recognition memory paradigms. Further, infant RAP processing abilities predicted to 12- and 16-month language scores above and beyond family history of SLI. The results of this study provide additional support for the validity of infant RAP abilities as a behavioral marker for later language outcome. Finally, this is the first study to use a battery of infant tasks to demonstrate multi-modal processing deficits in infants at risk for SLI.