Abstract: The purpose of the study was to investigate the development of children in direct inference and analyze the strategies children used during reasoning. The participants were 72 children randomly selected from a kindergarten and an elementary school including three groups aged 6, 7 and 8 with half boys and half girls in each group. The tests were carried out individually. The results showed that: (1) The 6- and 7-year-olds had preliminarily developed this kind of direct inference ability, the 8-year-olds had possessed this kind of inference ability. (2) There was no significant difference between affirmative premise and negative premise, and the same result was obtained when the semantic reverse between the premise and problem. (3) The capacity of creating effective strategy increased with ages, and nearly all 8-year-olds can use the effective strategy of “repeat or explain premise”.

Key words: children, direct inference, affirmative premise, negative premise, strategy