Development of Reasoning and the Tension between Scientific and Conversational Inference

We report two studies designed to examine the role of conversational understanding in young children’s scientific reasoning. The results indicate that performance can be influenced by the degree of specificity in questioning. Under nonspecific questioning, accurate reasoning was associated with both...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial development (Oxford, England) Vol. 9; no. 3; pp. 383 - 396
Main Authors Waters, Lorraine J., Siegal, Michael, Slaughter, Virginia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK and Boston, USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 01.01.2000
Subjects
Awareness
Conversation
conversational awareness
pragmatic development
Relationship
Scientific reasoning
Young children
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Summary:We report two studies designed to examine the role of conversational understanding in young children’s scientific reasoning. The results indicate that performance can be influenced by the degree of specificity in questioning. Under nonspecific questioning, accurate reasoning was associated with both vocabulary comprehension and pragmatic ability whereas under specific questioning it was associated only with vocabulary comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of the conversational knowledge that is required for success on measures of scientific reasoning.
Bibliography:istex:2449D4086B3203B283C44AA61A39D56C40D484CA
ark:/67375/WNG-DN2RLFFC-Z
ArticleID:SODE132
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0961-205X
1467-9507
DOI:10.1111/1467-9507.00132