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THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE ON THE USE OF LOGICAL SYMBOLS
Author(s) -
YOUNISS JAMES,
FURTH HANS G.
Publication year - 1967
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1967.tb01100.x
Subject(s) - psychology , class (philosophy) , construct (python library) , cognitive psychology , identification (biology) , developmental psychology , linguistics , artificial intelligence , computer science , philosophy , botany , biology , programming language
Twenty‐four deaf, twenty‐four hearing culturally deprived (American Indian), and twenty‐four middle‐class control young adolescents were trained in five daily sessions to identify picture‐instances as true or false denotations of symbolic statements of eight logical concepts. Training was non‐verbal in that subjects had to construct instances for statements of concepts or write statements for given instances. On the fifth day subjects were administered a paper and pencil test in which they had to identify newly introduced instances as true or false cases of concept statements. Deaf and Indian children manifested a similar performance pattern across concepts which differed notably from that of the control middle‐class subjects. With concepts which generated a broad class of logically equivalent but physically distinct instances and with that aspect of a concept which included a broad class of instances, control subjects were superior to deaf and to Indian subjects. In distinction, minimal differences among groups were observed in identification of an instance which came from a class of one or a narrow class. It was concluded that deaf and Indian subjects at the age‐level sampled tended to use symbols primarily to depict attributes literally while the controls were better able to apply symbols as they represent classes of instances. The results appear to conform to contemporary theories on the development of representational use of symbols and specify the deleterious influence of long‐term experiential deprivation on intellectual development.