Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies demonstrate a puzzling decline in relationalreasoning during development. Specifically, 3-year-olds failin a relational match-to-sample (RMTS) task, while youngerchildren (18-30 months) succeed (Walker, Bridgers, &Gopnik, 2016). Hoyos, Shao, and Gentner (2016) propose thatolder children fail because of a bias toward individual objectproperties induced by “avid noun learning.” If this is the case,children learning a language with a stronger emphasis onverbs, like Mandarin Chinese, may show an attenuateddecline in relational reasoning. We first test this possibility byreproducing the causal RMTS task in China, and find thatMandarin-speaking 3-year-olds outperform their English-speaking peers in the U.S. In a second experiment, we showthat Mandarin speakers exhibit a corresponding bias towardrelational solutions while English speakers prefer object-based solutions in an ambiguous context. We discuss possiblemechanisms through which language and culture maypromote (or hinder) the early development of relationalreasoning.