Matching and Equivalence Judgments in Very Young Children

Abstract

DAEHLER, MARVIN W.; LONARDO, RITA; and BUKATKO, DANUTA. Matching and Equivalence Judgments in Very Young Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 170-179. 3 experiments involving 122 subjects from 20 to 32 months of age were conducted to assess the role of perceptual and conceptual factors in matching and equivalence judgments of very young children. In the first experiment ability to match pictures on the basis of their common perceptual features was compared with ability to identify pictures by label. Younger children, especially boys, had greater difficulty matching identical pictures than identifying pictures on the basis of their common labels. In the second experiment, ability to match objects and pictures was investigated and it was found that object-object matching was easier than picture-picture matching. The third experiment examined the difficulty very young children have in matching stimuli at several levels of perceptual and conceptual similarity. Identical objects were more easily matched than objects belonging to the same basic level category. Matching objects belonging to the same superordinate taxonomic category or objects functionally complementary to each other was more difficult. The results of this series of studies reveal the very young child's ability to identify basic level, conceptual, and complementary relationships, show that objects are responded to more effectively than pictures, and illustrate the importance of both perceptual and verbal-symbolic processes in matching and identification of stimuli.