Logical Abilities of Young Children -- Two Styles of Approach

A mental model analysis of young children's conditional reasoning with meaningful premises

“…Most studies show a clear tendency for children as young as 7 years of age who reason with meaningful premises to produce a biconditional response pattern (e.g. Knifong, 1974;Wildman & Fletcher, 1977). There is some evidence that children can produce the pattern of responses that corresponds to use of the initial model (Barrouillet & Lecas, 1998) although only with unfamiliar premises.…”

“…For a given "If P then Q" relation, there are three categories of information that can modify the relations between an antecedent and a given consequent. These are (1) cases of <not-p and q> that have been shown to influence responding to the two invalid forms (Cummins, 1995;Cummins, 1995;Markovits & Vachon, 1990), (2) cases of <p and not-q> that influence responding to MP and MT (Cummins, 1995;Cummins et al, 1991;JanveauBrennan & Markovits, 1999), (3) cases of <not-p and not-q> that are necessary for explaining the strong tendency for biconditional responding in both children and adults (Knifong, 1974;Wildman & Fletcher, 1977). If this is the case, then Downloaded by [Selcuk Universitesi] at 07:59 27 December 2014 the high proportion of correct responding observed in young children for certain premise contents can be accounted for if we assume (a) in line with Andrews and Halford (1998) that young children can manipulate two relations (models) in working memory, and (b) that children use the minor premise as a retrieval cue during the fleshing-out process.…”

An Alternative to Piaget's Conceptualization of Logical Competence

“…Adolescents also do poorly on conversion, as shown in table 3. Knifong (1974) attempts to provide what he regards as a Piagetian explanation of the successes children have on transitivity and contraposition, suggesting that their thinking could be interpreted as transduction rather than deduction. He also feels that this would explain their poor performance on the invalidity principles.…”

Characteristics of the Conditional Reasoning of Educable Retardates

“…Finally, it could be argued that some of the retardates' explanations support Knifong's (1974) conjecture as to why children frequently interpret a conditional premise (i.e., If P, then Q) as a biconditional (i.e., P if and only if Q). Knifong demonstrated that such interpretations can be explained by the Piagetian construct of transductive reasoning; that is, the children reason that P and Q must co-occur.…”