Semantic Analogies by Young Children: Testing the Role of Inhibition

The present study directly tests the relationship between children’s performance in an analogy-making task involving semantic analogies and their inhibitory-control capacities tested with the Day-Night test (Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994). Our claim is that the development of analogy making can be best studied in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning, specifically, inhibitory control (Richland et al., 2006; Thibaut et al., 2010a,b). The selection of common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient, semantically related matches. Our results show that children with lower inhibition scores had lower scores in an analogy task of the A:B::C:D type, especially for analogies constructed with pairs of weakly semantically associated items (e.g., man-bed). The results agree with our analogymaking account. We also show that analogies with perceptual distractors were easier to solve than those with semantic distractors.