Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of age and task on children's verbal analogical reasoning The subjects were 8-year old(N -40), 10-year old(N -40), 12-year old(N -40) children. In each group, there were equal number of boys and girls. The task of this study was the words which consisted of four sets of four type analogies: synonym, antonym, function word and category membership. The experimental design in this study was a factorial design of 3(age;8. 10, 12) by 4(task: synonym, antonym, function word, category membership). The dependent measures were five response types : analogical reasoning performance score, encoding process score, inference process score, mapping process score, application process score. In the procedure, after a verbal analogy item was presented to a subject individually, the subject was asked to answer to each analogical reasoning question. The collected data were analyzed in terms of AIVOVA, Tukey test, and contrast test. The results were shown as follows: First, the analogical reasoning performance and each component process performances increased with age. Second, there were significant differences between the high score group and the low score group in each component processes. The high score group performed higher than the low score group in each age group. Third, the performance scores of antonym and function word were significantly higher than the other task types. Especially, the performance of synonym was the lowest. Fourth. there was difference in the justification between right performance and wrong performance. That is, inference process and application process were appeared in the right performance, unrelated answers and association were more often appeared in the wrong performance.