| Abstract: | Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that children who fail to make the transitive inference do so because they do not recall the premises. In the first, 32% of the children who made an incorrect inference in a transitive measurement task justified their inference by the correct premises. In the second, where spontaneous justification was encouraged by testing dyads on the same task, the percentage was 15%. In neither experiment were there children who justified an incorrect inference by incorrect premises or a solo premise. The results are interpreted as showing that not only can incorrect inferers store the correct premises, but that they can also retrieve them adequately. The pattern and outcome of interactions between nontransitive and transitive inferers in the dyad sessions parallelled similar studies with conserver-nonconserver dyads. Both sets of data were taken as reinforcing the commonality between transitivity and the other concrete operations. |
