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Category: Project

Description: Four year-old children took turns with an experimenter describing scenes depicting transfer (of an object of information) between people and/or animals. For example, the experimenter would describe a scene of children sharing ice cream as” The boy gave his sister some ice cream.” Next, a child would describe a scene such as one showing a father handing his daughter a slice of cake. If the child described the scene with, e.g., “The father handed his daughter a slice of cake” this would be considered matching the grammatical construction, but if the child described the scene with e.g., “The father handed a slice of cake to his daughter” this was considered a grammatical mismatch. Past research has shown that when scenes pairs were highly similar to each other, such as the two above, 4 year-old children were more likely to match than mismatch. However, when the scenes were dissimilar, such as a scene of a teacher teaching his young students the alphabet and the scene concerning the ice cream, the children were just as likely to mismatch as match. Present research extends these findings by showing that after a block of high similarity scene pairs, children become more likely to then be able to match constructions when describing scenes with low levels of similarity. This pattern of high superficial similarity helping children later match based deeper structural commonalities without the superficial similarity is a common pattern of analogical learning across domains.