Abstract: Three kinds of situations were designed to show children's operation in inference making. It also attempted to find out how children make transitive inference.The results showed.(1)Children aged 3 to 6 do have the capacity to make transitive inference.but they usually don't manifest it.(2)There are two factors leading to Chinese children's failure in transitive inference making:One is that they wrongly interpret the comparative sentences in Chinese, the other is that they don't remember the premises.(3) Children aged 3 to 6 possess different inner processing models in making transitive inference.Most younger children adopt the“partial processing model”,while older children adopt the“entire space processing model”.(4)There is no sex difference in transitive inference making for children aged 3 to 6.

Key words: preschool children, transitivity, relational reasoning, unidimensional memory, two-way memory