Language and Operations in Children's Class Inclusion Reasoning: The Operational Semantic Theory of Reasoning

In this article we critique two prominent theories of reasoning-mental logic and mental models-and argue that reasoning does not consist of either applying logical rules or constructing mental models. Instead, we propose an operational semantic theory of reasoning, according to which reasoning is based on children's operational understanding of key terms in a given problem. We then go on to consider an important recent developmental theory of reasoning, fuzzy-trace theory. In order to illustrate the view of reasoning proposed here we report a study of class inclusion. Dramatic differences in class inclusion performance were found as the result of linguistic context; performance was significantly higher when an explicit request for a subclass comparison preceded the class inclusion question as compared to a standard condition when the class inclusion question alone was asked. This was the case, however, only when the prior subclass comparison question referred to the same dimensions as the class inclusion question and not when irrelevant subclasses were referred to. Children's performance was also better when they sorted the materials into the supraordinate class as compared to the subclasses, but not when the experimenter sorted them for the child. These effects due to the operational and linguistic manipulations are discussed in terms of a general operational semantic theory of reasoning.