Khemlani Sangeet, Orenes Isabel, Johnson-Laird P N
Naval Research Laboratory, United States.
Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2014 Sep;151:1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.05.004. Epub 2014 Jun 3.
How do reasoners understand and formulate denials of compound assertions, such as conjunctions and disjunctions? A theory based on mental models postulates that individuals enumerate models of the various possibilities consistent with the assertions. It therefore predicts a novel interaction: in affirmations, conjunctions, A and B, which refer to one possibility, should be easier to understand than disjunctions, A or B, which refer to more than one possibility; in denials, conjunctions, not(A and B), which refer to more than one possibility, should be harder to understand than disjunctions, not(A or B), which do not. Conditionals are ambiguous and they should be of intermediate difficulty. Experiment 1 corroborated this trend with a task in which the participants selected which possibilities were consistent with assertions, such as: Bob denied that he wore a yellow shirt and he wore blue pants on Tuesday. Experiment 2 likewise showed that participants' own formulations of verbal denials yielded the same trend in which denials of conjunctions were harder than denials of conditionals, which in turn were harder than denials of disjunctions.
推理者如何理解和表述对复合断言（如合取和析取）的否定呢？一种基于心理模型的理论假定，个体列举与断言一致的各种可能性的模型。因此，它预测了一种新颖的交互作用：在肯定句中，合取“A且B”指一种可能性，应该比析取“A或B”（指不止一种可能性）更容易理解；在否定句中，合取“非（A且B）”指不止一种可能性，应该比析取“非（A或B）”（并非如此）更难理解。条件句是模糊的，它们的难度应该处于中间水平。实验1通过一项任务证实了这一趋势，在该任务中，参与者选择与断言一致的可能性，例如：鲍勃否认他在周二穿了黄色衬衫并且穿了蓝色裤子。实验2同样表明，参与者对言语否定的表述也产生了相同的趋势，即对合取的否定比对条件句的否定更难，而对条件句的否定又比对析取的否定更难。
