Sauerland Uli, Sugawara Ayaka, Yatsushiro Kazuko
Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany.
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
Open Res Eur. 2025 Feb 3;5:34. doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.18312.1. eCollection 2025.
Logical reasoning in young children is difficult to ascertain experimentally even for single propositional operators. We present a novel argument that four- and five-year old children are capable of reasoning with complex representations containing multiple logical operators.
The argument is based on an interaction between sentence interpretation and intonation. This interaction depends on the computation of logical inferences between the sentence uttered and possible alternative utterances containing proportional generalized quantifiers, and how adults arrive at different interpretations is well understood. The account that explains the interaction predicts that a specific intonation will disambiguate scopal interpretation in sentences with a negation and a universal quantifier, but not in sentences involving two quantifiers.
We show that preschool children speaking German are sensitive to the interaction between logical scope of expressions and intonation in the same way as adult speakers.
This result entails that preschool children can carry out logical reasoning within a higher order logic.
即使对于单个命题运算符，幼儿的逻辑推理也很难通过实验来确定。我们提出了一个新颖的观点，即四五岁的儿童能够对包含多个逻辑运算符的复杂表征进行推理。
该观点基于句子解释与语调之间的相互作用。这种相互作用取决于所说出的句子与包含比例广义量词的可能替代句子之间的逻辑推理计算，并且成年人如何得出不同的解释已得到充分理解。解释这种相互作用的理论预测，特定的语调将消除带有否定词和全称量词的句子中的辖域解释歧义，但在涉及两个量词的句子中则不然。
我们表明，说德语的学龄前儿童与成年说话者一样，对表达式的逻辑辖域与语调之间的相互作用敏感。
这一结果意味着学龄前儿童能够在高阶逻辑中进行逻辑推理。
