Seventy percent of the children (non-conservers in length) who had to respond to length equality as opposed to inequality made the correct invariance judgment and could characterize their choices in invariance language, while still failing the standard verbal task in which the experimenter used such phrases. (Author/SJL)

A nonverbal paradigm for assessing conservation based on an operant discrimination learning procedure is described. Initial results suggest that young children who could not conserve within the traditional verbal procedure were more likely to demonstrate conservation within the nonverbal paradigm and that traditional Piagetian tasks are verbally…