The present study examined whether the spontaneous verbal production scaffolds the accomplishment of analogical reasoning by children and adults. In the experiment, 4 to 5-years old children and adults were assigned to either of the following two experimental conditions. In the passive listening condition, the participants were told the two picture-stories which were conceptually similar but denoted by complementary verbs,such that the subject of the one event was the object of the other. In the spontaneous verbal production condition, the participants saw the same picture-stories but asked to explain what was going on in the picture-story. In both conditions, the participants were then asked to judge whether the pair of stories had similarities, and to draw an inference about the one story from the other story (i.e., analogical reasoning). The results showed that adults could find the similarities between the two stories and then accomplish analogical reasoning, regardless of the experimental conditions. Children on the other hand could detect the similarities between the two stories only in the spontaneous verbal production condition. Furthermore, children’s success in analogical reasoning depended on how they verbalize the stories; children who produced the same verbs across the two stories succeeded in the analogical reasoning. The findings suggest that spontaneous verbal production facilitates children’s analogical reasoning only when they help children to re-represent the relational knowledge between the base and target structures.
