The aim of the present study is to investigate the
performance of children of different ages on an
analogy-making task involving semantic analogies in
which there are competing semantic matches. We
suggest that this can be best studied in terms of
developmental changes in executive functioning. We
hypothesize that the selection of the common
relational structure requires the inhibition of other
salient features, such as, semantically related semantic
matches. Our results show that children’s performance
in classic A:B::C:D analogy-making tasks seems to
depend crucially on the nature of the distractors and
the association strength between the A and B terms, on
the one hand, and the C and D terms on the other.
These results agree with an analogy-making account
(Richland et al., 2006) based on varying limitations in
executive functioning at different ages.