Deductive Reasoning in a Spatial Task by Pitjantjatjara Speaking Children

There is little research about primary aged children’s deductive reasoning, especially in minority languages. We use an interactive spatial reasoning task to investigate how Pitjantjatjara-speaking children solve this task. A methodology was developed to track how locational and orientational information is combined by adults to make a spatial description, and how this information is used by children to make correct matches in a card matching task. This includes probabilistic models of reasoning and pragmatics. Pitjantjatjara speaking children make few errors, using spatial information to make logical and pragmatic inferences and resolve ambiguity.