主题关系在4~5岁儿童不同属性归纳推理发展中的作用

为探讨主题关系在儿童归纳推理中的作用，采用经典的三角归纳范式，设计了主题关系和知觉相似冲突、主题关系和分类学关系冲突两种情形，来考察4~5岁儿童在内在属性和情境性属性任务中的归纳推理。结果显示：当主题关系和知觉相似冲突时，从4.5岁开始儿童主要基于主题关系对情境性属性进行归纳推理，而对于内在属性的推论，4~5岁儿童在基于主题关系和基于知觉相似上没有显著差异。当主题关系和分类学关系冲突时，从4.5岁开始儿童主要基于主题关系对情境性属性进行归纳推理，从5岁开始儿童主要基于分类学关系对内在属性进行归纳推理。两个实验结果均发现5岁和5.5岁儿童能够依据不同的属性使用不同的关系推理，表现出归纳灵活性

The Roles of Thematic Relations in 4-5 Years Children's Inductive Reasoning of Different Properties

lthough even very young children were indicated capable of simple inductive reasoning, the basis underlying the early induction remains hotly debated. Thematic relations play an important role in children’s cognitive development. Because thematic association was a salient response during categorization and analogical reasoning tasks in young children, we hypothesized that thematic relations, which were external relations among objects co-occurred in space and time, can support children’s inductive reasoning when the inferred property was situational. Using classical picture-triad induction tasks, this study explored the roles of thematic relations in children’s inductive reasoning when thematic relations were pitted against perceptual similarity (experiment 1) or taxonomic relations (experiment 2). The inductive tasks included two kinds of property inferences: internal property inferences and situational property inferences. The participants were 4-5 years olds. Each child completed either internal property inferences or situational property inferences. The result of experiment 1 demonstrated: when thematic relations competed with perceptual similarity, children from 4.5 years made thematic relation-based induction in situational property inference, whereas there was no significant difference between similarity-based induction and thematic relation-based induction in 4-5 years olds’ internal property inference. The result of experiment 2 showed: when thematic relations competed with taxonomic relations, children from 4.5 years made situational property inference based on thematic relations, whereas those from 5 years made internal property inference based on taxonomic relations. Both experiments showed that children from 5 years olds can selectively use different relations to make inductive inferences of different properties. The major finding of the study was that thematic relations can support children’s inductive reasoning. Thematic relations play a primary role in young children’s inductive inference of situational property. In contrast, , thematic relations, like perceptual similarity, are less important while taxonomic relations served the chief basis during inductive inferences of internal property.