Premium
Children's ability to discriminate between types of proposition
Author(s) -
Russell James
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1983.tb00898.x
Subject(s) - psychology , proposition , mental age , developmental psychology , discriminative model , sentence , absolute (philosophy) , cognitive psychology , cognition , linguistics , psychiatry , philosophy , epistemology , artificial intelligence , computer science
In this experiment 192 children between 5 and 10 years were tested for their ability to discriminate between sets of 30 sentence pairs which differed on one of four dimensions. These dimensions were: general/particular, absolute/relative, objective/subjective and physical/intentional. Half of the children had the basis of the distinction explained to them after each trial and half of them did not. Performance did not rise above chance level in the latter case, but in the former discriminative ability was clearly evident at the 7–8‐year age level for all distinctions and at the 5–6‐year age level for the general/particular and the physical/intentional distinctions. It is suggested that the objective/subjective and the absolute/relative distinctions were difficult for the youngest children because these properties indicate a division between non‐mental and mental states.