Children's understanding of logical inconsistency

Five experiments involving 245 participants examined children's understandi ng of logical consistency. For instance, a character said that a man was bo th tall and very short. Only by 6 years of age did children show any unders tanding of logical inconsistency. This occurred despite: (1) good memory fo r the characters' claims; (2) the use of three different question forms inc luding whether a person had made sense, said something silly, or whether bo th things a person said could be right; (3) the ability to identify other t ypes of statements (e.g., factual inconsistencies) as not making sense; (4) the ability to compare and contrast the characters' claims in other ways; and (5) attempts to deepen children's processing of the claims by asking th em to draw what each character said. Similar to false belief understanding, there was a monotonic relation between the number of older siblings a chil d had and logical consistency understanding on one of the tasks. It is argu ed that children may fail the different consistency tasks because of both l ogical factors (e.g., insufficient insight into logical necessity) and nonl ogical factors tied to their social knowledge or insight into representatio n.