Linguistic factors in conditional reasoning

An experiment is reported which demonstrates the influence of three cognitive variables on adults' abilities to reason with conditional arguments embedded in either causal-temporal or class inclusion content. The three variables are the linguistic form of the conditional rule, the principle of conditional reasoning, and the order of the components in the conditional rule. The results showed considerable similarity in the effects of these factors for the two types of concrete content, but some interesting differences were found. The findings are discussed in relation to the results of recent investigations which involved abstract content and/or other deductive reasoning paradigms.