Boolean connectives: probing the interplay between Language & Logic

布尔连接词：探讨语言之间的相互作用

• 批准号: 510221551
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Artemis Alexiadou
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: IPN - Leibniz-Institut für die Pädagogik der Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/510221551?language=en
• 关键词: Boolean; connectives; probing; interplay; between

Research on the impact of language on arithmetic ability and early numerical learning has been growing significantly over the last decades. But when we turn to other areas of mathematical cognition, such as those involving basic logical concepts that can be expressed using everyday language, research on the impact of language is still lacking. The BooLL project seeks to fill this gap and brings novel methodology and evidence to bear on the issue of whether logical abilities are dependent on native language. We focus on the Boolean connectors NOT, OR, AND, XOR, NOR, NAND and develop a battery of nonverbal tasks to investigate the understanding of such connectives both by children and by adults, as well as the ability to compose these connectives. Some Boolean connectives can be expressed in natural language as a single vocabulary item (NOR), while others cannot (*NAND). Our tasks involve both kinds of connectives and allow us to compare them. We investigate what they reveal about logic, natural language semantics and pragmatics, and their interactions. Our experimental paradigms specifically target areas where logic and language diverge, such as the inventory and mapping of logical connectives to natural language connectives (e.g. the linguistic connective 'or' can map on to either inclusive OR or exclusive XOR), or aspects of the grammar that are known to cause a mismatch between standard logic and language: negative concord construals of sequences of negation, ambiguities and cross linguistic variation in how combinations of negation and disjunction ('not A or B') or conjunction ('not A and B') are interpreted, pragmatic enrichment. Nonverbal logical abilities are assessed with a new experimental paradigm: a computer game (the Cool Boole School Game) professionally designed as part of our project preparation for the purpose of learning and testing Boolean connectors. Tracking participants’ game-play in the software creates rich data on how and how quickly children and adults with different native languages are able to solve different tasks involving single or combinations of Boolean connectives. Verbal comprehension is assessed with a newly developed test instrument: Mathematical Word Problems involving Boolean connectives. Although there is a rich tradition of inquiry in the psycholinguistics literature on the compositional interpretation of logical operators in natural language, there is to our knowledge no experimental research on the compositional interpretation of logical operators in nonverbal contexts – that is, outside the domain of language. BooLL thus seeks to break new ground by taking a first step towards probing compositional abilities in logic independently of language.

在过去的几十年里，关于语言对算术能力和早期数字学习的影响的研究一直在显着增长。但是，当我们转向数学认知的其他领域时，例如那些涉及可以使用日常语言表达的基本逻辑概念的领域，仍然缺乏对语言影响的研究。BooLL项目试图填补这一空白，并带来了新的方法和证据，以承担逻辑能力是否依赖于母语的问题。我们专注于布尔连接符NOT，OR，AND，XOR，NOR，NAND，并开发了一系列非语言任务，以调查儿童和成人对这些连接词的理解，以及撰写这些连接词的能力。一些布尔连接词可以在自然语言中表示为单个词汇项（NOR），而另一些则不能（*NAND）。我们的任务涉及两种连接词，并允许我们比较它们。 我们调查他们揭示了逻辑，自然语言语义学和语用学，以及它们之间的相互作用。我们的实验范式专门针对逻辑和语言分歧的领域，例如逻辑连接词到自然语言连接词的库存和映射（例如，语言连接词“或”可以映射到包含或异或），或已知导致标准逻辑和语言之间不匹配的语法方面：否定序列的否定一致性、歧义以及如何解释否定和分离（“非A或B”）或连接（“非A和B”）组合的跨语言变异，语用丰富。非语言的逻辑能力进行评估，一个新的实验范式：电脑游戏（酷布尔学校游戏）专业设计的一部分，我们的项目准备的目的是学习和测试布尔连接器。在软件中跟踪参与者的游戏过程，可以创建丰富的数据，说明使用不同母语的儿童和成人如何以及如何快速地解决涉及单个或组合布尔连接词的不同任务。言语理解通过新开发的测试工具进行评估：涉及布尔连接词的数学应用题。尽管心理语言学文献中有丰富的关于自然语言中逻辑运算符的合成解释的研究传统，但据我们所知，没有关于非语言语境中逻辑运算符的合成解释的实验研究-也就是说，在语言领域之外。因此，BooLL试图通过探索独立于语言的逻辑组合能力迈出第一步来开辟新的天地。