Context, conservation and the meanings of more

Three experiments analysed children's performance on quantity tasks in relation to the context of the tasks and the children's understanding of the term more . The first two experiments compared the performance of 74 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds on conservation tasks in the standard context and in a modified context in which the children were led to interpret more to mean an addition rather than the observably larger of the two quantities. The children were significantly more likely to conserve in the modified context than in the standard and to focus on addition vs. appearance. Experiment 3 examined the developmental changes in the understanding of more . A total of 144 children of 4, 6 and 8 years were tested on four quantity tasks in which more could be understood in different ways. The youngest group understood more to mean an addition and were less likely to judge on the basis of appearance. Non‐conserving children at the middle and oldest ages judged according to appearance, while conservers understood more in a more flexible way. It is concluded that conservation can be best understood by examining the child's construal of the social and linguistic context.