学前儿童基于物体重量归纳推理的发展：中美跨文化比较
摘要
<p id="C2">Weight has been of interest to scientists from early in the study of cognitive development. More recent research indicates that preschool is an important transition period for using weight generally across tasks in the physical domain. For example, 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, can choose a heavy versus a light object to make a balance with an intermediate weight tip and category objects by weight through observing others’ demonstration. In this research, we investigate when American (Study 1) and Chinese children (Study 2) can use verbal labels to make inductive reasoning about weight, and whether this ability is cross-cultural universal <p id="C2-1">In Study 1, two- to 6-year-old American children (<italic>N </italic>= 100) were familiarized with three identical-appearing objects, two of them have one weight, the third one has another weight (e.g., two heavy, one light). The experimenter picked up one object and said “This is a <italic>dax</italic>.” Children were requested to find another “<italic>dax</italic>” from the left two objects and give it to the experimenter. If the experimenter label a heavy object, the child chooses the heavy one of the two objects, s/he was scored as a 1. In contrast, if s/he chooses the light one, s/he was scored as a 0. There are two trials, thus, the total scores ranged from 0 to 2. The results indicated that there was a significant effect of age,<italic> H </italic>(4) = 41.75, <italic>p </italic>< 0.001. Children’s responses were compared to chance levels and the results suggested that the performance of 4-year-olds (<italic>p</italic> = 0.004), 5-year-olds (<italic>p</italic> < 0.001), and 6-year-olds (<italic>p</italic> < 0.001) was significantly above chance. However, the performance of 3-year-olds (<italic>p</italic> = 0.16) was not significantly different from chance, the performance of 2-year-olds was marginal significantly below chance (<italic>p</italic> = 0.055). To sum up, children can successfu