Abstract
The present study investigated the development of children’s analogical reasoning, focusing especially on the questions of whether children base their correspondences on conceptual-relation matching, and whether analogical inferences follow those correspondences. The participants (42 children, 14 each at ages 4 years old, 5 years old, and 6 years old) were first asked to decide whether a pair of stories had similarities, and then to draw an inference from one of the stories. The pairs of stories had either both structural and perceptual similarities or only structural similarities. The results indicated that the 6-year-olds were able to identify the similarities in the stories based on conceptual-relation matching, could make voluntary inferences that contained the identified similarities, and were not affected by the presence of perceptual similarities. The 5-year-olds drew inferences from the second story on the basis of the first story only after they had been encouraged to match the stories. The findings were discussed in relation to the ability to re-represent relational knowledge and the capacity to integrate multiple relations.
