Bases of young children's judgments about more

While the young child's difficulties in correctly comprehending the term less are well known, it appears less widely recognized that young children may also encounter difficulties with the term more. The present study shows that in a task which requires judgments about more to be based on the relative numerosity of sets, 3–4-year-old children may base their judgments on other parameters, such as the extent to which the sets are homogenous with respect to the color of their components. The implications of such findings are briefly considered.     

On the problems of being more or less the same

Sixty children aged 2–3 to 5-2 were given four quantity tasks which tested their understanding of more and same. Two tasks involved addition, two involved judgment of static quantities. One of each type of task required a manipulative response, and one of each required a yes/no judgment. The tasks involved judgments of equality and inequality. Tasks involving a manipulative response were significantly easier than those involving a yes/no judgment, indicating that the nature of the response required of the child is crucial. All other differences were negligible, indicating that the other task variables investigated do not affect the child's ability to respond correctly. The ability to make accurate responses was not strongly associated with counting ability. There was a significant difference in the children's counting responses depending on the method used to elicit it.     

A constraint on comparisons: Equally detailed alternatives

Children's errors in collective comparison tasks are atributed to the comparison of the wrong classes. It is specifically hypothesized that alternative classes are erroneously formed subject to the constrain that the same kinds of properties are criterial for each alternative. This hypothesis, called the equally detailed alternatives hypothesis, is tested in three experiments with hierarchically organized stimuli and requests to compare a superordinate class and a nonincluded subclass, for example, dogs and yellow cats. In all three experiments 4-year-old children's comparisons were found to be in accord with the hypothesis. In the first experiment both perceptual and linguistic factors determine which classes are compared. In the second experiment, as predicted, erroneous subclass comparisons were more common when all subclasses were distinguished by the same kinds of properties. In the third experiment, the children were asked to partition the stimulus objects into the classes to be compared. The vast majority of partitions were erroneous and in accord with the hypothesis. Potential benefits of the constrain are considered.     

Perspective role-taking in young children

Children between the ages of 4 and 7 years were asked to select a photograph depicting the visual perspective of a puppet which was placed at various locations around a dollhouse in a modified version of Piaget and Inhelder's three-mountain task. A shielded condition was used for half of the children. Three types of errors were examined in relation to the shield condition, age, and type of vantage point (views from the corners and from the sides). Shielding of the stimulus array reduced egocentric errors among 4-year-olds, producing a pattern of responses more typical of that observed among older children. Increasing specificity in perspective role-taking with age was indicated by changes in error patterns. Finally, the task was more difficult on trials with corner views, particularly when the child's own view included some of the cues present in the puppet's perspective.     

Classes,collections, and distinctive features: Alternative strategies for solving inclusion problems

This study analyzed the strategies that children ages 5 through 8 years used on two modified versions of Inhelder and Piaget's (The early growth of logic in the child. New York: Norton, 1964) class inclusion task. In two experiments, children were tested on Wilkinson's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 64–85) “percept” inclusion task in which distinctive features marked both supraordinate and subclasses. It was hypothesized that children who fail standard Piagetian inclusion tasks succeed on the “percept” task by counting and comparing mutually exclusive features rather than using features as markers for classes and subclasses. The hypothesis was supported by children's performances on “percept” tasks in which solutions based on feature counting conflicted with solutions based on consideration of class inclusion relations. In two other experiments, children answered part-whole and part-part comparison questions in which both terms were described as classes and/or subclasses, or in which one of the two terms was described as a collection (e.g., a bunch of grapes). These experiments contrasted Markman and Seibert's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 561–577) “organization” hypothesis that the greater psychological integrity of collections facilitates reasoning on part-whole comparison problems with the hypothesis that the faciltative effect results from the “large number” connotation of collective nouns. Results on collection problems in which parts were described as collections supported the “large number” hypothesis. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for Piaget's theory.     

Spatial localization in children after changes in position

Five experiments investigated the young child's ability to retrieve a target after a change in the position of the child or the target. In Experiments I–IV 2- to 4-year-old children were rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° about a stationary square table containing four identical hiding locations at each of the cardinal locations. The children tested performed this task significantly better than chance, but their errors reflected either their response biases in the absence of any information as to the location of the target, or the repetition of a response which had been successful in retrieving the target prior to the change in position. When the children were forced to respond rapidly, these errors increased significantly. In Experiment V a table top was rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° in front of 3- to 10-year-old children. There were two cue situations. The child saw the rotation, or the child had to infer the rotation. Young children made errors of the types observed in Experiments I–IV. The ability to inhibit these errors increased with age. By 7 years of age performance was virtually perfect when the child could observe the change in position of the hidden object. The ability to infer the positional change developed more slowly and was good but not perfect at 10 years of age.     

On the young child's use of lexis and syntax in understanding locative instructions

The ability of two and three year old children to comprehend in, on and under was tested in five contexts. In the first context, where responses did not depend on the child manipulating the experimental objects, responses were invariably correct except for some difficulty with under in the youngest subjects. In the other four contexts, which did involve manipulation of the objects by the child, responses varied as a function of the noun phrases used to refer to the experimental objects which themselves remained the same across different contexts. The result suggest that the young child's comprehension of instructions involves an interaction between aspects of the instruction's lexis and syntax and the child's construal of context.     

Generalization of self-instruction: The effect of strategy adaptation training as a function of cognitive level

In an examination of the factors involved in the generalization of self-instruction training, 48 preoperational and concrete operational first- and second-grade children received either self-instruction training or no training on the Matching Familiar Figures Test. In subsequent training using a perceptual perspective-taking task, half of the children in the self-instruction group received training in the specific adaptation of the previously learned strategy, the remainder received training in the general adaptation of the strategy. All groups were posttested on these two tasks and a generalization task (Tower of Hanoi). Preoperational and concrete operational children in both adaptation groups improved significantly at posttest on both training tasks. On the generalization task, only concrete operational children in the specific adaptation group showed significant improvement. These findings support the view that the format of instructions interacts with the child's cognitive capacities. The need is emphasized for a more individualized intervention context which considers the developmental status of child.     

Early discrimination among small object collections

Two studies are presented which examine the young child's ability to discriminate between two small object collections on the basis of numerosity and to maintain that discrimination across changes in number-related cues. A transfer procedure and counting tasks were also included. In Study 1, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds were reinforced for choosing either a two- or three-item array when length-density cues were manipulated across two training phases of 20 trials each. Training was followed by a transfer task in which one- and four-item arrays were displayed. Most 2-year-olds were able to learn the discrimination while at the same time displaying little quantitative ability. Further, their transfer responses were transpositional in nature. In Study 2, 2-year-olds were given a similar discrimination task in which numerosity was contrasted simultaneously with length-density and area-brightness cues. Again, most children learned the discrimination and transferred that learning on the basis of relational cues.     

Developmental inter-relationships among concrete operational tasks: An investigation of Piaget's stage concept

One hundred and one primary school children were tested on eight concrete operational tasks. Each child's performance on each task was classified as either preoperational, transitional, or fully operational. Cross-classification tables were constructed showing the joint classification of children's performance on all possible pairs of the eight tasks. Two models of intertask relations, Wohlwill's (The study of behavioral development. New York: Academic Press, 1973) divergent-decalage and reciprocal-interaction patterns, were evaluated for their fit to the cross-classification data using χ² goodness-of-fit procedures. Instances of both these patterns were identified in the data. The findings give some support to Flavell and Wohlwill's modification of Piaget's stage concept, in which individual groupings (e.g., seriation) are the structural basis of the interrelationships among concrete operational tasks. Tasks based on the same rule showed a degree of developmental interdependence (reciprocal-interaction patterns), while tasks based on different rules appeared to develop independently (divergent-decalage patterns). However, only one-half of the cross-classification tables were adequately described by either the divergent-decalage or the reciprocal-interaction patterns.     

The production and verification tasks in mental addition: An empirical comparison

We respond to A. Baroody's comment (1984, Developmental Review, 4, 148–156) with an empirical comparison of the production and verification tasks. With the exception of performance at the first grade level, the two tasks yield essentially identical conclusions. The results of an adjunct task, in which the rate of mental counting was assessed, suggest that children as young as second grade are relying on memory retrieval to a significant degree. In contrast to Baroody's speculation, there appear to be no widespread difficulties associated with results from the verification task. Furthermore, the task permits a more analytic examination of performance and underlying mental process than is afforded by the production task. We conclude by reiterating the empirical support for a model of fact retrieval, and suggesting that accessibility of the arithmetic facts is the basic factor which underlies both fact retrieval and procedural knowledge performance.     

Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses

We report two toy-manipulation experiments investigating 4–5-year-old children's interpretations of relative clauses. In the first experiment we show that the frequency with which relatives modifying the matrix direct object are interpreted as referring to the matrix subject is sensitive to the nature of the material in the relative. Animacy of the relative direct object leads to an increase in subject coreference errors for relatives; a similar effect of animacy was not found for infinitival complements. We propose that such errors arise when the child's sentence processor is taxed. In our second experiment we compare children's interpretations of relatives to their interpretations of temporal participial complements. Children eschewed coreference between the complement and the object of a passive prepositional phrase in the case of temporal participials but not in the case of relatives. We interpret this result as evidence that children are capable of analyzing relatives as constituents of the NP node, and hence that this node is recursive in their grammars. We discuss the results of both experiments in the context of a two-stage parsing model, arguing that our data fit a picture of children's linguistic abilities in which the 4-year-old has a sophisticated competence grammar and a parsing mechanism of essentially the same structure as the adult's. We compare our approach to a number of other approaches to children's relative clause interpretations in the literature, arguing that these alternatives are too structure-specific and can lead to underestimations of the child's competence grammar. We conclude that our analysis is compatible with a picture of acquisition in which the child's competence grammar of relatives is not qualitatively different from the adult's.     

Less is not more: Further observations on nonlinguistic strategies

In an attempt to clarify the role of nonlinguistic preferences in children's responses to the words more and less, children 3–4 years of age were administered three tasks. Two of these required the child to indicate which of two arrays had more or less items, as instructed; the third task required the child to point to any one of two arrays. Children consistently selected the arrays with more items on all three tasks. The present finding of a response bias necessitates a reinterpretation of earlier studies of more and less. The results are discussed in terms of the full and partial semantics hypotheses as articulated by E. Clark.     

Children's understanding of natural language hierarchies

Three experiments examined young children's ability to evaluate the relationship between concepts as one of inclusion. In Experiment 1, the same group of 4-to 7-year-old children were given three tasks: one in which they made judgments about whether “all” or “some” members of a category were included in another category, and two tasks in which they made inferences based on knowledge of inclusion relations. The majority of children succeeded on at least one of the tasks, thereby implying that they could evaluate inclusion relations. Two further experiments provided more evidence for this hypothesis: Experiment 2 confirmed that nursery children could answer quantitative questions about conceptual interrelationts; Experiment 3 demonstrated that nursery schoolers could solve certain inference problems involving the construction and evaluation of hierarchies.     

An apparatus for linguistic and cognitive studies in young children

An apparatus is described that permits one experimenter to obtain high quality audio and video tape recordings of young children's behavior in cognitive-linguistic tasks while leaving the experimenter free to concentrate on working with the child. The apparatus is portable, robust, relatively child-proof, and distraction-free, features that make it useful for different types of research for a considerable age range of children in a variety of settings such as the child's home, the laboratory, the nursery, and the hospital.     

Contextual sensitivity in young children's drawings

Previous research has examined the characteristic errors made by young children when drawing from a three-dimensional array. The aim of the present research was to investigate the influence of context in copying tasks. In a series of three experiments children between the ages of 4 and 7 years were presented with contrasting models to copy. These included cups and sugar bowls in various combinations and orientations. In each experiment the children's copies were scored for inclusion or omission of the occluded handle on the model. The results showed that nearly one third of the children did not respond consistently by either copying accurately or by always including the occluded handle. Instead the findings pointed to a large group of children whose responses were directed by the type of context present within the arrays.     

The importance of basic concepts in the individual assessment of preschool children

The directions for administering four major preschool instruments were analyzed to determine whether any basic concepts are included in the words spoken by the examiner. Boehm found that young children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, tend to have difficulty with numerous basic concepts. Consequently, the inclusion of several of these concepts in test directions may hinder a preschool child's understanding of what is expected of him (and possibly invalidate his scores). The WPPSI directions were found to include the greatest number of basic concepts, and the ITPA directions included the fewest; the Stanford-Binet and McCarthy Scales were between these extremes. The implications of these findings for individual assessment of young children's abilities were discussed.     

The acquisition of mental verbs: A systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state

It is generally recognized that the ability to contemplate and communicate about the knowledge, beliefs, and goals of oneself and others is a benchmark of human cognition. Yet, little is known about the beginnings of this ability, in large measure because methods for accurately assessing very young children's ability have been unavailable. Here we present the results of using a method of convergent analyses of naturally occurring speech to assess the young child's ability to contemplate and communicate about mental state. The first study describes the frequency and function of verbs of mental reference such as think and know in the speech of one child from 2;4 to 4;0. The second examines shorter samples of speech collected from 30 two-year-olds over a 6 month period. Results from both studies suggest that the earliest uses of mental verbs are for conversational functions rather than for mental reference. First attempts at mental reference begin to appear in some children's speech in the second half of the third year. Since most of the children studied exhibited the linguistic knowledge necessary to make reference to mental states, we conclude that the absence of such reference earlier suggests that still younger children lack awareness of such states, or at the very least, an understanding of their appropriateness as topics of conversation.     

Development of hierarchical conceptual relationships in children's semantic memories

The present study was designed to determine when children first display evidence of hierarchical conceptual organization. Children aged 5 to 9 answered either semantic or sensory questions about a list of words composed of either superordinate terms, prototypical category instance, or moderately typical instances. In a later unanticipated cued recall task the children were given taxonomically related cues composed of the two remaining word types not used in the orienting phase. The 5-year-olds' performance revealed that they possessed a modest degree of hierarchically organized conceptual information, which by age 9 had developed to relatively sophisticated levels. In particular, it was found that the range of information contained in the 5-year-olds' conceptual hierarchies was considerably narrower than that of the 9-year-olds', which supports Rosch's contention that conceptual categories are first constructed around prototypical instances. The children's performance on the cued recall task was also compared to their performance on traditional class inclusion and object-sorting tasks. It was found that the object-sorting task overestimated, while the class inclusion task underestimated the extent to which conceptual information is hierarchically organized in 5-year-olds.