| Abstract: | Research by Markman (1979) suggests that children up to 12 years of age do not spontaneously detect logical inconsistencies. The present study was directed to factors which may limit children's ability to recognize their failures to understand. A task was devised which involved materials that were clearly based on children's experiences, and which involved premises and conclusions which were presented contiguously, rather than being interspersed among other sentences. Ninety-six 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence “stories” told by a puppet, and were asked to justify their responses. The stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent, and in whether the principle upon which a story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated. The results showed developmental differences. By Age 7 years, most children were quite capable of evaluating sentences for their logical consistency. Five-year-olds, however, did not perform as well on the task, especially when the information upon which the logical cohesiveness of the stories rested was implicitly, rather than explicitly, stated. An examination of the justifications provided by these children revealed that they tended to question the empirical validity of individual sentences, rather than integrate the story as a whole and examine its overall logical structure. |
