What do children bring to the language learning task, and how does what they hear affect what they say? These are key questions for developmental psychologists, linguists and teachers alike. Finding answers will deepen our understanding of the relationship between children’s linguistic development and the cognitive mechanisms that make language acquisition possible.

This project will focus on the role of analogical reasoning in geometric puzzles and in language production tasks in English-speaking five-year-olds.

Analogy is a learning mechanism where knowledge about relations gained in one context can transfer to a new but related context. This project will be the first explicit test of the hypothesis that the ability to find similarities between language constructions is correlated with the ability to identify similarities in a non-linguistic, spatial domain.