Construcción de causalidad y contracausalidad en sujetos con distinto nivel educativo

This work is part of a larger project in which we seek to analize how Spanish speakers produce and understand causal and counter-causal relations. Our general hypothesis is that causality is a basic conceptual / semantic relation that is processed “by default” and more easily than other relations, such as counter-causality. On this occasion, our specific objectives were: 1) to evaluate the extent to which formal education influences this process; 2) what is the effect of the absence / presence of specific connectives, especially in relation to the level of formal education of the subject. We carry out a psycholinguistic experiment designed to elicit causal and counter-causal continuations of short texts with and without connective. We evaluated two groups of subjects with different levels of formal education. The results show that: a) in the absence of connective, the tendency to establish causality is strong and consistent; b) with connective, error levels are higher for counter-causal relations and the time required to process them is significantly higher. This pattern holds for the two groups of subjects analyzed, so do not depend on schooling but, instead, seems to be a more basic linguistic process shared by all speakers.