This study of the understanding of the words "and" and "or" in children, ages 2-7 1/2, indicates that "and" is used to express enumeration, and "or" to express alternatives, and that most children's responses are correct at age 4 and beyond. Differences between the linguistic and logical meaning of connection are discussed. (Author/LLK)

Nine tasks were designed to test the developmental sequence of three types of "because" (affective, physical, concrete logical) in 100 children aged 3 to 7 years. The tasks tested whether comprehension of "because" preceded its usage and at what point children understood that sentences with reversed clauses were incorrect.…

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

Children's ability to infer consequences from sentences automatically was assessed in two cued recall experiments. Seven- and eight-year-old children and adults served as subjects. (JMB)

The development of children's comprehension of cause and effect relationships was studied in 68 kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children. (BRT)

To broaden and develop reasoning powers in students the teacher should encourage observation, critical questioning of hypotheses, evaluation of conclusions and how they are reached, and propose new avenues of approach to problems. (JD)

To determine to what extent children of preschool age comprehend the meaning of logical connectives, 64 5- and 6-year-olds were told to hand differently colored and shaped wooden blocks to an experimenter. The commands involved various English idioms used for conjunction (e.g. both black and round), disjunction (either black or round), and…

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

Presents a rebuttal to Hidi and Hildyard's (1976) criticism of Macnamara et al.'s (1976) assertion regarding the ability of four-year-old children to grasp implicatives and presuppositions. (AM)

This paper describes a series of experiments and research paradigms designed to investigate language development, specifically semantic, syntactic, and communicative development in children. Included are discussions of two studies of semantic development which examined developmental changes of word meanings. Also discussed are three studies of…

Theoretical and empirical research derived from Piagetian theory is collected on the intellectual development of the elementary school child and his acquisition and utilization of conservation concepts. The articles present diversity of method and motive in the results of replication (validation studies of the description of cognitive growth) and…