Shipley E F
J Psycholinguist Res. 1979 Jul;8(4):301-31. doi: 10.1007/BF01067136.
The class-inclusion task is regarded by Piaget as a measure of the child's mastery of the structure of hierarchical classification. Class-inclusion was improved by changing the wording of the question to conform to standard English usage. A theoretical argument is offered that the child's difficulties with this task derive from confusion of collective comparisons, in which properties of classes are compared, and distributive comparisons, in which properties of elements are compared. A grammatical constraint on expression of distributive comparisons--an element of a class cannot be compared to an element of an included subclass--is hypothesized to be overgeneralized to expressions referring to collective comparisons such as the class-inclusion task. This hypothesis accounts for the improvement in class-inclusion performance with changes in wording of the question and for the finding that young children's response to class-inclusion questions and to ungrammatical requests for comparison of an element of a class and an element of an included subclass are similar: the children respond readily but understand wrongly that the comparison involves coordinate classes.
类包含任务被皮亚杰视为衡量儿童对层级分类结构掌握程度的一种方法。通过改变问题的措辞以符合标准英语用法，类包含能力得到了提高。有人提出一种理论观点，即儿童在这项任务上遇到的困难源于对集体比较（即比较类的属性）和分配比较（即比较元素的属性）的混淆。据推测，对分配比较表达的一种语法限制——一个类的元素不能与一个包含子类的元素进行比较——被过度推广到了诸如类包含任务等涉及集体比较的表达中。这一假设解释了随着问题措辞的变化类包含表现的提高，也解释了以下发现：幼儿对类包含问题以及对关于一个类的元素和一个包含子类的元素进行比较的不符合语法要求的请求的反应是相似的：孩子们很容易做出反应，但错误地认为这种比较涉及并列类。
