Phonologies of Asia and Africa Ed. by Alan S. Kaye (review)

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138LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1 (1999) If this is correct, then our success with Cosmides's task is based on a formal property of the rules that are presented (either they or their contrapositives express prohibitions) rather than on their subject matter. Proponents of ecological rationality would then be advised to seek a somewhat different kind of explanation for why we fail at Wason's task but succeed at Cosmides's, one that involves formal semantic analysis of both the experimental sentences and of the procedures we use to verify them. P was correct the first time: we do think in Fs, xs, and ys. REFERENCES Cosmides, Leda. 1989. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition 31 187-276. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The language instinct. New York: Harper Collins. Wason, Peter C. 1966. Reasoning. New horizons in psychology, ed. by Brian M. Foss 135-51. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Department of Linguistics Universit

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