Study On The Developmental Characteristics Of Deontic Reasoning Of Preschool Children

Deontic reasoning refers to reasoning about what individuals can do;what they must do or what they cannot do under given circumstances.Although kindergarten education and family parenting have provided children with certain deontic reasoning abilities,we know little about when preschool children get deontic reasoning abilities and how does the deontic reasoning develop.To explore whether 3-year-olds perform better in deontic reasoning than indicative reasoning,in Experiment 1,we used a simplified version of selection task paradigm of Dack and Astington,namely “Squeaky Mice Task”,and to test the deontic reasoning ability and indicative reasoning ability of 98 3-year-olds in the same story context.Results show that(1)the correct rate of deontic reasoning in 3 years old children are significantly higher than that in indicative reasoning,to prove that 3-years-old children have the “deontic advantage”.(2)Children have appeared deontic advantage during 36 ~ 39 months.(3)The language ability of 3-yeasr-old do not affect the performance of Selection Task.In Experiment 2,in order to explored the development law of deontic advantage of preschool children and question of the domain of deontic reasoning,90 children aged 3 to 5 years were assigned “Evaluation Task”,involved deontic reasoning and indicative reasoning.It is found that(1)3-years-old children show deontic advantage,while children aged 4 and 5 show no deontic advantage.(2)Preschool children do not show significant differences in moral domain,social conventional domain and prudential domain of deontic reasoning.Moreover,the moral domain does not show the development laws that are basically consistent with the domain of social conventional and prudence.(3)There is a significant positive correlation between deontic reasoning ability and language ability in 5-year-old children.In Experiment 3,selected 120 5-year-olds to carry out “deontic tasks”,and let them to choose between keys on computers based on voice and picture cues.The deontic task involved four kinds of materials: specific,abstract,negative and positive.Results show that(1)the correct rate of 5-year-old children under specific materials is significantly higher than that of abstract materials,but there is no significant difference between 5-year-old children under positive and negative conditional sentences.(2)There is no significant difference in the reaction time between negative and positive conditional sentence materials among 5-year-old children,but the abstract material reaction time is shorter than that of specific material.This study shows that 3-year-olds perform better in deontic reasoning than indicative reasoning,and show deontic advantage;4?5 years old children show no deontic advantage.Preschool children do not completely distinguish the moral,social conventional and prudential domain of deontic reasoning.The deontic reasoning of five-year-old children under specific content materials is better than abstract content,and the reasoning is faster.