UCLA

Understanding abstract relations is a crucial aspect of human cognition. This thesis explores how children learn to reason about semantic relations, such as antonyms and synonyms, and the factors that enhance their ability to use these relations for analogical reasoning (e.g., understanding that big:small hold the same relation as clean:dirty). Chapter I investigates the early stages of how young children generate antonyms, identifies patterns in their responses across different parts of speech, and compares their abilities to those of relational and natural language models. Chapters II and III focus on how both children and models utilize antonyms to solve verbal analogies, and how relational language cues and semantic distance affect this skill. This thesis provides a comprehensive examination of the development of antonymy understanding and identifies key factors that can enhance the ability of both children and models to solve verbal analogies.