Korean J Child Stud. 1988; 9(2): 133-156.

Comparison of Performance in Classification , Seriation , and Grouping of Kin Terms in Korean Children.

한국아동의 친척명 분류 , 서열 , 군집 수행의 비교

이순형

Soon Hyung YI

This study investigated developmental change with reference to continuity theory in the acquisition of concepts of kin relation, task difficulty with reference to cognitive complexity, and interrelationships in the performance of cognitive tasks of kinship concepts with reference to cognitive parallelism. The subjects consisted of 6-, 8-, 10, and 12-year-old randomly selected children attending kindergartens or elementary schools in Seoul. The schools were located in various residental areas regarded as either middle or lower class. The 81 boys and 80 girls participated in 3 experiments on classification, seriation, and grouping. The instrument for the classification, seriation, and grouping tasks was composed of 10 10㎝ black on white line drawings of the head and upper torso area of persons in kin relationship. The data was analyzed with MANOVA. A significant age effect was found in the 3 quasi- experiments. There were significant effects on task difficulty. The biosocial power distribution indirectly influenced children`s acquisition of kin relational concepts; that is, children performed better in male-kin than in female-kin tasks. There was a high correlation in performance between the 3 cognitive tasks. These findings support the continuity theory (except for seriation), a model which arranges kin-names in order of cognitive load, the centric status of men in society, and the theory of cognitive developmental parallelism.