The influence of linguistic form on reasoning: The case of matching bias

A well-established phenomenon in reasoning research is matching bins: a ten dency to select information that matches the lexical content of proposition al statements, regardless of the logically critical presence of negations. Previous research suggested, however, that the effect might be restricted t o reasoning with conditional statements. This paper reports two experiments in a which participants were required to construct or identify true and fa lse cases of propositional rules of several kinds, including universal stat ements, disjunctions, and negated conjunctions. Matching bias was observed across all rule types but largely restricted to problems where participants were required to falsify rather than to verify the rules. A third experime nt showed a similar generalization across linguistic forms in the Wason sel ection task with only, if conditionals substituted for universals. The resu lts art discussed with reference to contemporary theories of propositional reasoning.