Abstract
Two experiments were performed in order to determine the extent to which children in the age range of five to 10 years can discriminate between (a) necessarily true vs. contingent propositions and (b) necessarily false vs. contingent propositions. In each study five types of sentence pairs (30 examples of each) were presented and success was assessed by the number of errors made. Children were either taught the basis of the discrimination by the experimenter trial‐by‐trial post hoc or received no such instruction. Children in the five to six age range appreciated the necessarily true/contingent distinction with teaching, and the necessarily false/contingent distinction without teaching, although ease of discrimination varied strongly with sentence type. The data were interpreted as being contradictory to the Piagetian account of the development of necessity, and as suggesting that linguistic experience may play a more central role in the acquisition of logical reasoning than Piaget proposed.
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