Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational processing is critical for complex cognition (Gentner, 2003, 2010). Here, we investigate the development of twofundamental relationssame and different. Previous research suggests that childrens understanding of same may precede un-derstanding of different, and that languageespecially labels for these relationsmay support this understanding (Hochmannet al., 2017; Christie & Gentner, 2014). We presented 4-year-olds with either a different-only or a same/different mixedversion of the Relational-Match-to-Sample (RMTS) task. Children made relational matches at above-chance rates inboth conditions and performance was comparable with previous findings on a same-only RMTS (Christie & Gentner,2014; Hoyos, Shao, & Gentner, 2016; replication in process). Across both conditions, children who said the wordssame/different outperformed those who did not, suggesting that spontaneous production of the terms indicated better en-coding of the relations. Interestingly, children produced the word same more than the word different, even when presentedwith match-to-different trials.