Abstract
The present study investigated effects of surface similarity and general rules on young children's analogical reasoning. In 2 experiments, children were presented with 2 types of triad choice tasks. In Experiment 1, the task required them to recognize the relational similarity between the sample and the target in Experiment 2, the structural similarity. Experiment 1, in which the participants were 4-and 5-year-olds, showed that the 4-year-olds could recognize relational similarities in the presence, but not the absence, of surface similarities, whereas the 5-year-olds could recognize the relational similarities in both conditions. Experiment 2, in which the participants were 4-to 6-year-olds, demonstrated that the 4-and 5-year-olds could recognize structural similarities in the presence, but not the absence, of surface similarities, whereas the 6-year-olds could do so in both cases. The qualitative data indicated that the surface similarities increased the production of general rules, and that the older children produced such rules to a greater extent than the younger ones did. These findings suggest that effects of surface similarity on young children's analogical reasoning correlate with the possibility of abstracting general rules.
