Classes and collections: Internal organization and resulting holistic properties

Markman, Ellen M.; Seibert, Jeffrey M.

doi:10.1016/0010-0285(76)90019-0

Cited by 128 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Also, the logical/pragmatic distinction evident in the present data was strongly anticipated by prior schemes that classified relations on the basis of internal and external associations (Warren, 1921;Wundt, 1893). The two inclusion relations were distinguished (Markman & Seibert, 1976); class inclusion was placed with the logical relations, part-whole with the pragmatic relations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relations in this family involve inclusion that is pragmatic rather than necessary, as is the case with class inclusion (Chaffin, Herrmann, & Andrews, 1981;Winston & Chaffin, 1982). The relations selected were derived freely from the literature on the partwhole relation (Chaffin, Winston, & Herrmann, 1984;Cruse, 1979;Goodman, 1951;1espersen, 1933;Lyons, 1977;Markman & Seibert, 1976;Miller & JohnsonLaird, 1976;Nagel, 1961;Scharvy, 1980). Parts of functional objects are distinguished by the fact that they must be in a particular spatial and functional configuration in order to play their proper roles in the functioning of the whole (e.g., "airplane-wing").…”

Section: An a Priori Taxonomy Of Semantic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The similarity and diversity of semantic relations

Chaffin

Herrmann

1984

Memory & Cognition

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There is a rich variety of semantic relations in natural languages. Subjects' perceptions of similarities among relations were studied for a wider variety of relations than had been used in previous studies. Forty subjects sorted 31 cards bearing five example pairs of each of 31 semantic relations. Subjects were able both to distinguish the relations and to perceive their similarities. A hierarchical clustering analysis of the sorting data indicated that the subjects perceived five families of semantic relations (contrasts, class inclusion, similars, case relations, and part-wholes). The five families were distinguished in terms of three properties of semantic relations: contrasting/noncontrasting, logical/pragmatic, and inclusionlnoninclusion. Within each family, relations also were sorted in ways consistent with their defining properties. Relations were therefore viewed not as unanalyzable primitives, but in terms of the relational properties that distinguished them.Semantic relations between concepts are basic components of language and thought (Bierwisch, 1970; H. H. Clark, 1970;Evanechko & Maguire, 1972;Evens, Litowitz, Markowitz, Smith, & Werner, 1980;Katz, 1972;Leech, 1974;Miller, 1969; Miller & JohnsonLaird, 1976;Osgood & Richards, 1973;Palermo, 1978).Relying on associative and introspective data, Wundt (1893) identified and classified a wide range of relations. Wundt recognized two general classes: outer associations (part-wholes, word sequences) and inner associations (categorical relationships, similars, coordination, causal relations). At least 13 other classification systems were proposed prior to 1911 (Warren, 1921).More recently, researchers have been directly concerned with the study of semantic relations in two related areas: the development of general models of semantic memory (Anderson, 1976;Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1973) and the study of semantic decisions (Cohen, 1977;Danks & Glucksberg, 1980;Kintsch, 1980;Smith, 1977). In both areas, research has focused on a limited number of relations, and the similarities between relationships have not been explored. General models of semantic memory have been developed to account for the comprehension and representation of propositional knowledge (Anderson, 1976;Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1973). In these models, information is represented by a network oflabeled relaPreparation of this article was supported in part by a faculty research grant from Trenton State College to the first author. We thank Mary Crawford for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Roger Chaffin, Department of Psychology, Trenton State College, Trenton, NJ 08625. tions between nodes that stand for concepts. Relations serve as unanalyzed, primitive terms; consequently, their number has been restricted in the interest of economy. As a result, only a fraction of the total number of relations in the English language have been considered. The scope and power of current models would be enhanced by encompassing the wid...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An a Priori Taxonomy Of Semantic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The similarity and diversity of semantic relations

Chaffin

Herrmann

1984

Memory & Cognition

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“…It is still further enhanced when the term concerns weight (Lovell, Mitchell, and Everett, 1962). Hence, it seems that performance is better with more concrete, or more graphic, terms: similarly, Markman and Seibert (1976) have found enhanced set-theoretic judgements when the superordinate set is one that is characteristically relational, such as a family ;and Donaldson (1978, p. 67) has shown that the saliency of some aspect of the situation may also mislead children.…”

Section: Premisesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Children'S Syllogistic Reasoning

Johnson‐Laird

Oakhill

Bull

1986

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A

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Most theories of the development of deductive ability propose that children acquire formal rules of inference. An alternative theory assumes that reasoning consists of constructing a mental model of the situation described in the premises, scanning the model for an informative conclusion, and then searching for alternative models that refute this conclusion. Hence, performance should reflect two principal factors: the difficulty of constructing a model, which depends on the “figure” of the premises, and the number of models that have to be evaluated to respond correctly. In Experiment 1, two groups of children (9- to 10- and 11- to 12-year-olds) drew conclusions from 20 pairs of syllogistic premises. The results confirmed that children are affected both by figure and by number of models. Experiment 2 corroborated these findings for all 64 possible forms of syllogistic premises. The development of reasoning ability may therefore depend on the acquisition, not of formal rules of logic, but of procedures for manipulating models.

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“…However, together with other research that has challenged many of Piaget's claims about the emergence and development of the young child's classification skills, (e.g., Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Jonhson & Boyes-Braem, 1976;Markman & Siebert, 1976;Mandler, 1982), they do show that the Piagetian position, at least as it is usually interpreted, provides a limited perspective from which to view the development of metaphoric understanding and the nature of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie it (see also, Vosniadou & Ortony, 1983 Billow, 1975;Malgady, 1977;Vosniadou & Ortony, 1983), where the metaphors compared objects for which the primary basis of similarity was perceptual. …”

Section: ---------------------------mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of Difficulty in the Young Child's Understanding of Metaphorical Language

Vosniadou¹,

Ortony²,

Reynolds³

et al. 1984

Child Development

148

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Sources of Difficulty in the Yound Child's Understanding of Metaphorical LanguageThree experiments examined children's understanding of metaphorical language.In these experiments, preschool, first grade, and third grade children heard short stories ending with a metaphorical sentence describing an action. They were then asked to act out the stories and the metaphorical sentences using toys in a specially constructed "toy world." Metaphor comprehension was assessed on the basis of the children's enactments. The experiments manipulated the predictability of the story endings given the already established context, and two aspects of the complexity of the metaphorical sentences themselves: the verb of the metaphorical sentence (literal versus nonliteral verb), and the explicitness of its comparative structure (simile versus metaphor). Results showed that both the predictability of the story endings and the complexity of the metaphorical sentences had a marked effect on the difficulty of the metaphor comprehension task. The data were interpreted as supporting the view that the success or failure in comprehending metaphorical language depends on the overall difficulty of the comprehension task, conceptualized in terms of the interactive effects of different difficulty sources, rather than simply on the fact that a linguistic input requires a metaphorical interpretation. The experiments also identified some of the conditions under which even preschool children show evidence of metaphor comprehension, and clarified aspects of the development of metaphoric competence.Existing research reveals conflicting findings about the ability of children to understand metaphorical language. While research directly investigating children's comprehension of metaphor tends to show that metaphor comprehension does not occur until late childhood or early adolescence (Asch & Nerlove, 1960; Billow, 1975;Cometa & Eson, 1978;Winner, Rosenstiel & Gardner, 1976), there is other evidence that even preschool children have some basic metaphoric competence. For example, Gardner (1974) found that given a pair of adjectives (hard/soft) and a pair of sounds, colors, or faces, 3 1/2-year-old children could sometimes match such adjectives with an appropriate sound, color or face. Gentner (1977) also showed that preschool children can perform analogical mappings from the domain of the human body to pictures of mountains or trees as consistently as adults.Further support for the idea that young children have some basic metaphoric competence comes from observations that preschool children are very creative in their use of language, making sophisticated comparisons that involve the ability to see similarity between things that, at a superficial level, seem very dissimilar (Billow, 1981;Carlson & Anisfeld, 1969; Chukovsky, 1968;Gardner, Winner, Bechhofer & Wolf, 1978;Piaget, 1962; Winner, MacCarthy, & Gardner, 1980 (1983) found that by four years of age children are able to distinguish comparisons based on metaphorical similarity from those ba...

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Classes and collections: Internal organization and resulting holistic properties

Cited by 128 publications

References 15 publications

The similarity and diversity of semantic relations

The similarity and diversity of semantic relations

Children'S Syllogistic Reasoning

Sources of Difficulty in the Young Child's Understanding of Metaphorical Language

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