Effects of directionality in deductive reasoning: I. The comprehension of single relational premises

Four experiments involving 123 university students tested directionality ef fects in the comprehension of spatial relations, quantified statements, and propositional connectives with a sentence-picture verification task. Prese ntation of the referents of terms in the statements was separated by 1 s, a nd presentation order was congruent or incongruent with the order of terms in the statement. Some relations showed faster verification times for congr uent display order, others for incongruent display order, and still others showed no directionality effect. The authors proposed a 2-step process mode l for the construction of semantic representations of relational statements , in which a reference object is established first, and then the second obj ect is attached in relation to it. This theory explains the various directi onality effects as a general preference to process information about the re ference object before information about the target object.