Can Language be Replaced? Physical Representations of Relations Instead of Language Labels in Relational Mapping: Do They Help Young Children?

This paper is trying to explore whether language has a very specific role in analogy-making as claimed by many researchers, or it is just one very effective way of building mental representations of the relational structure of the task. If the latter is true there must be also alternative ways of aiding mental representations of relations by young children. In the experiments described in this paper we use physical objects as representing the relations within the task and it turns out that this is an effective way of helping children to build relational representations and use them successfully in an analogical mapping task.