Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Comparison supports the development of children’s analogicalreasoning. The evidence for this claim comes from labora-tory studies. We describe spontaneous comparisons producedby 24 typically developing children from 26 to 58 months.Children tend to express similarity before expressing differ-ence. They compare objects from the same category beforeobjects from different categories, make global comparisons be-fore specific comparisons, and specify perceptual features ofsimilarity/difference before non-perceptual features. We theninvestigate how a theoretically interesting subset of children’scomparisons – those expressing a specific feature of similar-ity or difference – relates to analogical reasoning as measuredby verbal and non-verbal tests in 6th grade. The number ofspecific comparisons children produce before 58 months pre-dicts their scores on both tests, controlling for vocabulary at54 months. The results provide naturalistic support for experi-mental findings on comparison development, and demonstratea strong relationship between children’s early comparisons andtheir later analogical reasoning.