WHEN DO CHILDREN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND LOGICAL INFERENCE AS A SOURCE OFKNOWLEDGE

Previous research (Sodian & Wimmer, 1987) suggests that it is not unti l about 6 years of age that children come to recognize that one can ga in knowledge through inferential rather than direct means. However, a great deal of research suggests that children have a sophisticated und erstanding of other aspects of knowledge, such as perception and commu nication around age 4. Three experiments were carried out in which we made important task information more salient in order to determine whe ther children's performance in previous research on their understandin g of inference had underestimated their abilities. The design included controls to ensure that children's attribution of knowledge to the st ory character could not be based on an egocentric tendency to attribut e their own knowledge. Results indicated that (a) enhancing the salien ce of important information significantly improved children's performa nce; (b) by 4 or 5 years of age children begin to understand inference as a source of knowledge, around the same time they evidence an under standing of knowledge gained through perception and communication; and (c) that their performance lagged slightly behind that exhibited on a standard false-belief task.