Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Whether logical inference is available without language is highly debated. One such inference is the disjunctive syllogism(A Or B, Not A, Therefore B). Evidence from a search task that required disjunctive reasoning suggests that that thesyllogism is unavailable before age 3 (Mody & Carey, 2016). However, in a replication of the same task using language(i.e., verbal negation), even 2.5-year-olds succeeded (Grigoroglou, et al., 2019). Here we explore the role of languagein childrens logical reasoning. 2.5- to 4-year-olds performed the non-linguistic task, after a short training in reasoningby exclusion. Half of the children received linguistic training (e.g., heard there is no coin in X cup); half received non-linguistic training (i.e., saw that one location was empty). Results show that 2.5- and 3-year-olds were more successful inreasoning with the disjunctive syllogism after the linguistic training. Thus, offering children the premise Not A verballyfacilitated logical reasoning.