Minimal semantic instructions

This chapter provides the compositional details, showing how lexical meanings can be combined (via relatively simple operations) to form complex meanings, and how executing these meanings/instructions can yield conjunctive concepts whose atomic constituents are monadic or dyadic. After introducing some assumptions about the syntactic structures that connect meanings with pronunciations, the discussion turns to simple examples like combining ‘cow’ with a plural morpheme, and work up to untensed clauses like the complement of ‘saw’ in ‘saw a dog chase cows’. The next step is to accommodate tensed constructions, matrix sentences, indices, relative clauses, and examples involving sentential negation. A key idea, borrowed from Tarski, is that sentential expressions can be viewed as predicates of a special sort (rather than denoters of truth values). Finally, it is argued that not only can this proposal handle quantificational constructions, it yields an account that is preferable to more familiar accounts that employ Fregean typology.

Complexity of Logical Rule in an Abstract Conceptual Task

The experiment investigated the relative ease with which 30 adult human subjects in college could identify relevant attributes and rules relating them in a series of tasks in which five-dimensional truth tables were used as stimuli. The results indicated that two- and three-dimensional conjunctive concepts were attained as easily as simple concepts. Inclusive disjunctive concepts were more difficult, except when negation was involved. Subjects tended to solve disjunctive tasks by using conjunctive hypotheses and, rather than identify why some statements were true (which was the required response), they would specify the conditions which made the remaining statements false.

Effects of Informative Feedback and Active Training upon Concept Attainment

Informative feedback procedures were compared with active training in concept attainment. 60 first-, second-, and third-grade children were presented with conjunctive concepts and assigned at random to each of 12 groups. The stimuli were drawings on cards representing the concepts. A 4 × 3 factorial design was employed which involved 3 combinations of feedback plus active training and 3 levels of task complexity. The results showed the informative feedback groups (right-wrong, nothing-wrong and right-nothing) discovered the concepts faster than the active training groups. Over all 3 levels of task difficulty the right-wrong condition yielded significantly better performance than the other feedback conditions and, in addition, nothing-wrong resulted in a faster rate of learning than right-nothing.

Acquisition of Conjunctive Concepts under Different Postfeedback Conditions

A major purpose of this study was to investigate the formation of concepts under different postfeedback conditions in order to assess between hypothesis-testing theories and S-R associational models. Postfeedback conditions were made contingent on the correctness of S‘s response. 288 college students learned conjunctive concepts of varied complexity. The results supported “S-R associational hypothesis” and, in addition, the length of postfeedback interval did not affect acquisition of concepts.