Five-year-old children were trained on the length relationships between adjacent members of a five-term series of sticks, and subsequently tested on their abilities (1) to judge the length relationships between nonadjacent pairs of the series, and (2) to incorporate an unseen novel stick into the series through inference. (CM)

Three experiments are reported which utilized a five-term transitive inference task to investigate the development of preschool childrens', elementary school students', and college students' ability to solve transitive inferences on length relations. A developmental model specifying changes at two stages of constructing an internal linear order is…