Adding apples and oranges: Alignment of semantic and formal knowledge (1998)
Authors
Abstract
We show that the same mechanism that mediates analogical reasoning (i.e., struc- tural alignment) leads to interpretive ‘‘content effects’’ in reasoning about arithmetic word problems. Specifically, we show that both college students and textbook writ- ers tend to construct arithmetic word problems that maintain systematic correspon- dence between the semantic relations that people infer from pairs of real-world objects (e.g., apples and baskets support the semantic relation CONTAIN [content, container]) and mathematical relations between arguments of arithmetic operations (e.g., DIVIDE [dividend, divisor]). Such relational alignments, to which we refer here as semantic alignments, lead to selective and sensible application of abstract formal knowledge. For example, people usually divide apples among baskets rather than baskets among apples, and readily add apples and oranges but refrain from adding apples and baskets.
Bibliographic entry
Bassok, M., Chase, V. M., & Martin, S. A. (1998). Adding apples and oranges: Alignment of semantic and formal knowledge. Cognitive Psychology, 35, 99-134.
Miscellaneous
| Publication year | 1998 | |
|---|---|---|
| Document type: | Article | |
| Publication status: | Published | |
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