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Abstract
Two experiments tested the facilitative effect of dialectical oppositionality in a predication learning task. Subjects were college and high school students. Experiment 1 (N = 160) demonstrated that subjects more readily learned descriptive words that predicate a meaning in relation to a targeted item when such words were dialectical opposites than when they were not opposites (p < .001). Experiment 2 (two samples; N = 50, N = 50) compared the heuristic benefit of various predication instructions, using consonant-verb-consonant (CVC) trigrams as learnable items. It was found in cross-validation that dialectical oppositionality facilitated learning at an equal or higher level of efficiency than did other forms of predication such as identity, negation, and qualification (p < .001).