Length Seriation and Serial Correspondence

Abstract

428 children in kindergarten and primary school Grades 1 to 6 were given two serial-correspondence tasks and one length-seriation task. The majority of the kindergarteners solved the serial-correspondence tasks by means of direct correspondence, whereas the children from the primary school frequently used double seriation as a solution strategy. It was also shown that serial correspondence was acquired earlier in development than single-length seriation. These results could be interpreted in terms of the solution strategies used in the serial-correspondence tasks, i.e., serial correspondence might reflect another ordering principle than seriation or a more primitive aspect of seriation.