Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research investigates the role of language in children's ability to perform an analogical mapping task. We first describe the results of a simple mapping task in which preschool children performed poorly. In the current study, we taught the children to apply relational labels to the stimuli and their performance improved markedly. It appears that relational language can call attention to domain relations and hence improve children's performance in an analogical mapping task. A computer simulation of this mapping task was performed using domain representations that differed in their degree of elaboration of the relational structure. The results of the simulation paralleled the experimental results: that is, given deeply elaborated representations, SME's preferred interpretation produced the correct mapping response, while when given shallow representations its preferred interpretation produced an object similarity response. Taken together, the empirical and computational findings suggest that development of analogy and similarity may be explainable in large measure by changes in domain representation, as opposed to maturational changes in processing. They further suggest that relational