La activación de los términos durante la comprensión de proposiciones cuantificadas

Abstract

An advantage of first mention (reader�s faster access to participants mentioned first in a sentence), has previously been demonstrated both in English (Gernsbacher and Hargreaves, 1988; Gernsbacher, Hargreaves and Beeman 1989) and Spanish, where word order is a less important cue to assess semantic agency and syntactic subjecthood (Carreiras, Gernsbacher and Villa, 1995). These authors conclude that the advantage arises from general cognitive processes that occur naturally during comprehension, rather than linguistic factors. This paper investigates whether the same general cognitive processes could account for the well-established phenomenon of the figural-effect in syllogistic reasoning. Wheterick and Gilhooly (1990) have recently claimed that the figural-effect is due to syntantic subjecthood. We examine the accessibility of first-mentioned terms in quantified sentences the syntactic subjecthood is pitted against first-mentioned position. In two experiments, we demostrate that the advantage of first mention occurs in quantified sentences both when the first-mentioned term is the subject or the predicate of the sentence. The results are explained within the framework of the mental-model theory of reasoning (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird and Bara, 1984).