A Question of More or Less

Abstract

PIKE, RUTH, and OLSON, DAVID R. A Question of More or Less. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 579-586. Developmental changes in 5-7-year-old children's mental representation of addition and subtraction events were examined by means of the response times required to answer more or less questions. Although all children could answer both types of questions correctly following both addition and subtraction operations, the latency patterns for more mature children suggest that they represent additions and subtractions in terms that are more compatible with more and less questions, respectively. The less mature children represent both operations in terms that are more compatible with more questions. A second study showed that when this latter group of children was induced to form representations similar to those of the more mature group, then both groups performed in much the same way. It was concluded that performance differences were attributable to differences in the mental representations assigned to events, not in the procedures employed in comparing the representations. The representations appear to differ both in lexical content and in the referential features of the words in that the younger children's meanings are specified in terms of perceptual features in the display whereas older children's meanings are specified in terms of other concepts or representations in the system, for example, more/less/same.