Children's comprehension of Italian comparative forms and the three-term problem solution

Children aged 7;6 to 10;0 were required to solve 2-term relational problems in order to explore developmental changes in the comprehension of Italian positive and negative comparatives. The results indicate that at first children spatially represent the two terms of the positive comparatives in a contrastive-positional way, while in the second phase children represent the terms relationally. Comprehension of negative comparatives is characterized by three phases: a contrastive-positional phase, a presuppositional phase and a relational representation. The older subjects were subsequently divided into two groups based on their previous performance, and required to solve 3-term series problems in order (a) to confirm and extend the result of the first experiment; (b) to examine whether the linguistic comprehension of the comparative was a sufficient and necessary prerequisite for solution of 3-term problems. The developmental sequence of comprehension of comparatives was confirmed. Furthermore, the results suggested how cognitive load in making transitive inferences is influenced by linguistic encoding. The data are discussed in the light of a linguistic model versus a spatial representation model. A developmental version of a spatial representation model is proposed to account for the results. © 1983, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.