Mental Models and the Meaning of Connectives: A Study on Children, Adolescents and Adults

We present a study on the ability to comprehend conjunction, exclusive disjunction, bi-conditional and conditional. Mental model theory predicts differences in difficulty in dealing with such connectives, and it also predicts that it is easier to envisage situations that comply with an assertion than situations which do not comply. We carried out an experiment on children, adolescents and adults to validate these predictions within a developmental perspective. Participants had to judge some states of affairs as complying or not complying with sentences involving connectives. A further aim of the experiment was to test the power of the theory to account for connectives’ comprehension within a pragmatic context. Thus, while half of the participants dealt with an abstract version of the task, the other half coped with aversion of the task, the other half coped with a pragmatic version where the sentences were uttered by a character known as sincere in the complying condition and as a liar in the not complying condition. The results of the experiment show that difficulty in comprehension of the different connectives depends on the number of models they require. Also, the results show that it is easier to envisage situations complying with the meaning of a connective than situations which do not comply. The results hold for all groups of participants in both versions of the task. We conclude that mental model theory offers a plausible account of connectives' comprehension, which holds also within the investigated pragmatic context.