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Abstract
Laboratory studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of making comparisons on children's analogical reasoning skills. We extend this finding to an observational dataset comprising 42 children. The prevalence of specific comparisons, which identify a feature of similarity or difference, in children's spontaneous speech from 14–58 months is associated with higher scores in tests of verbal and non-verbal analogy in 6th grade. We test two pre-registered hypotheses about how parents influence children's production of specific comparisons: 1) via modelling, where parents produce specific comparisons during the sessions prior to child onset of this behaviour; 2) via responsiveness, where parents respond to their children's earliest specific comparisons in variably engaged ways. We do not find that parent modelling or responsiveness predicts children's production of specific comparisons. However, one of our pre-registered control analyses suggests that parents' global comparisons—comparisons that do not identify a specific feature of similarity or difference—may bootstrap children's later production of specific comparisons, controlling for parent IQ. We present exploratory analyses following up on this finding and suggest avenues for future confirmatory research. The results illuminate a potential route by which parents' behaviour may influence children's early spontaneous comparisons and potentially their later analogical reasoning skills.

Abstract In a series of three experiments, we investigated the development of children's understanding of the similarities between photographs and their referents. Based on prior work on the development of analogical understanding (e.g. Gentner & Rattermann, 1991), we suggest that the appreciation of this relation involves multiple levels. Photographs are similar to their referents both in terms of the constituent objects and in terms of the relations among these objects. We predicted that children would appreciate object similarity (whether photographs depict the same objects as in the referent scene) before they would appreciate relational similarity (whether photographs depict the objects in the same spatial positions as in the referent scene). To test this hypothesis, we presented 3‐, 4‐, 5‐, 6‐, and 7‐year‐old children and adults with several candidate photographs of an arrangement of objects. Participants were asked to choose which of the photographs was 'the same' as the arrangement. We manipulated the types of information the photographs preserved about the referent objects. One set of photographs did not preserve the object properties of the scene. Another set of photographs preserved the object properties of the scene, but not the relational similarity, such that the original objects were depicted but occupied different spatial positions in the arrangement. As predicted, younger children based their choices of the photographs largely on object similarity, whereas older children and adults also took relational similarity into account. Results are discussed in terms of the development of children's appreciation of different levels of similarity.