ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Recently, a number of studies of the analogical abilities of young children have challenged the generally accepted notion that reasoning by analogy is a developmentally sophisticated skill. This notion arose from two sources: from the performance of children in intelligence tests such as the StanfordBinet, and from the theoretical work of Piaget (Inhelder and Piaget 1958; Piaget, Montangero and Billeter 1977). Piaget proposed that analogical reasoning was the hallmark of formal operational thinking, emerging in early adolescence, and a large body of work has found evidence apparently consistent with this developmental position (e.g. Gallagher and Wright 1977; Levinson and Carpenter 1974; Lunzer 1965; Sternberg and Nigro 1980). More recently, however, studies of problem solving by analogy
(Brown and Kane 1988; Brown, Kane and Echols 1986; Brown, Kane and Long 1989; Holyoak, Junn and Billman 1984), of the use of analogy in learning tasks such as reading and spelling (Goswami 1986, 1988a, 1988b), and even of performance in the difficult “item” or classical (a:b::c:d) analogies used in intelligence testing (Alexander, Wilson, White and Fuqua 1987; Goswami, 1989; Goswami and Brown 1990) have provided evidence against the notion that very young children are unable to reason by analogy.
