INDUCTIVE REASONING FOSTERS THE CONSTRUCT ION OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES

32 children of the fifth form of a grammar school for girls were rando mly assigned to two equally large groups. One group received a trainin g of inductive reasoning whereas the other group continued their lesso ns. Before and after the training, both groups were administered the C ulture Fair Test CFT 3 and, after the training, a clause-analogy-test. This test requires the Ss to recognize how a clause is transformed in to another clause and this transformation rule has to he used in order to transform a third clause analogously. The test turned out to be re latively difficult. Nevertheless, the trained children outperformed th e not trained significantly It is concluded that the training was succ essful in improving the children's inductive reasoning and that the tr ained children were more efficient in recognizing and using syntactica l regularities than the nor trained children.