Conclusion

Abstract

The results of the present experiments lead to the conclusion that the meaning components of the kinship terms differ with respect to foreground and background information. Foreground information is explicitly communicated information; background information is not the proper content of the message; it is assumed to be true. In general the generation is the foreground information of the problems being studied, and gender is the background information. For whatever reason, however, the masculinity of many male kinship terms is more background information than the femininity of the corresponding female terms. When processing a negation, one searches for the meaning component the negation refers to, starting with the information that is most in the foreground. This explains the difficulty of the riddles in the three negation experiments as well as the asymmetry between the riddles with male and female kinship terms. That masculinity is more background information and more likely presupposed than femininity accounts also for the results of the three latter experiments in which a decision had to be made with respect to gender or generation. Explaining the asymmetry between male and female kinship terms as well as between unmarked and marked adjectives in terms of background and foreground information has the advantage that one can easily account for the effects of contextual factors, linguistic or psychological, on reasoning tasks with these terms.