Summary.An investigation of the different claims made by Bryant and Piaget about children's ability to make proportional judgments is presented. Using a sample of 59 children aged between 5 and 11 years, it was found that contrary to Piaget's predictions they could logically connect two discrete perceptual experiences as demanded by proportional type tasks. As suggested by Bryant's thesis, the difficulty young children found in making proportional judgments was one of analysing these initial perceptual relationships. Minor modifications to Bryant's thesis are proposed, which entail extending it to include relativexabsolute coding as a higher level cognitive skill. This enables discrete levels of understanding the concept of proportion to be identified. From a theoretical viewpoint this study adds support to Bryant's critique of Piaget's work.