The Rules Learning Ability Of 3 To 5-year-old Children By Imitate A Sorting Strategy

Imitation is an ability during children's early development,which makes children acquire skills and related behaviors form adults and other people under their own cultures.The researches showed that three years' old children not only could imitate the outward behaviors but also could imitate abstract rules.It should be noted that the foreign studies of children's abstract rules' learning capacity have been matured for a long time.However,the same researches are limited in our nation and there is hardly studies in this realm.To sum up,we believed that it is necessary to retest the cross cultural consistency of the abstract rules' learning ability on Chinese participants.And at the same time,we want to compare the difference between ages so that we could understand the developmental tendency and the mature time of this capacity.Two experiments were carried out to explore the ability of 3 to 5- year-old children in learning the abstract rules through imitation. Experiment 1 assessed children's capacity to sort colorful objects.The results indicated that there were significant differences between the experimental condition and the control condition on the preferential-sort score and the color-sort score.Morever, the age difference on the preferential-sort score is marginally significant, however,no difference was found on the color-sort score.Experiment 2 assessed children's capacity to sort invisible sound objects.Our results showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental condition and the control condition on the sound-sort score. Morever,age difference on the sound-sort score was also significant.We conclude that children have potential of using abstract rules through imitation of adults.The conclusion are following:(1)Three years' old children has own the imitative ability of sorting stratrgies preliminarily.In addition,children could express their own behaviors through abstract the potential rules of adults by observing the outward behaviors. (2)Though the learning of visible rule(color) is develops with age,but there is no significant difference between 3,4 and 5 years' old children,which indicated that it maybe has been matured in abstracting and imitating color rule for three years old children.(3)There is always a sharply and marked development in invisible rules'(sound) learning from three to five years old children.Furthermore,the developmental speed between three and four is faster than four and five.It probably showed that the invisible rules' learning ability will be matured at five years old or even later.(4)It is possible that sex has s crucial influence on visible rules' learning.But in contrary,no such significant influence has been exerted on invisible rules' learning.