Pragmatic determinants of children's responses to the Wason Selection Task

A pilot study and two experiments are reported in which thematic versions o f the Wason Selection Task were used to assess children's conditional reaso ning. The pilot and first experiment each involved 100 eleven year olds, wh ile the second experiment involved 36 eight year olds and 36 ten year olds. Results of the pilot suggested that 11 year olds can perform well on the f ull Selection Task, provided that the rules take the form of justified perm issions or obligations. The first experiment confirmed this, with some of t he error patterns on non-justified rules being interpretable in terms of ch ildren's spontaneous judgements of costs and benefits. The second experimen t established that even eight year olds can perform well with appropriate t hematic versions of the Selection Task. These findings are discussed in rel ation to theories of contextually moderated formal competences, social cont racts and pragmatic schemes, and are held to be most consistent with pragma tic schema theory.