Nonverbal and Verbal Performance on a Number Conservation Problem and a Proposal about the Determinants of Nonconservation

This study compared the ease of verbal and nonverbal versions of a number conservation problem for 4and S‐year‐old children. The nonverbal task employed a ‘train‐transfer’ procedure in which children were first trained to a criterial level to make one response to stimulus pairs that contained two rows of the same number in one‐to‐one correspondence and a different response to stimulus pairs in which one of the rows was of greater or of lesser number than the other. Conservation performance was maintaining the learned response to the identical pair after one of its rows had been deformed. Taking both ages together the nonverbal task was the easier. However, children's justifications showed that verbal processes may have been responsible for both correct and incorrect performance in many cases. The data are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that children interpret conservation terms perceptually when used by others in certain contexts in spite of what they know about the underlying fact of conservation.