摘要：Adults, 9-year-old children, and 5-year-old children were trained on multiple A-B and A-C matching tasks. Then they received a series of tests, first symmetry (B-A, C-A), then equivalence (B-C, C-B), and finally equivalence-equivalence tests (BC-BC). The latter tests assessed whether the Ss matched BC compounds with equivalent elements with one another and BC compounds with nonequivalent elements with one another. Most adults and 9-year-old children demonstrated equivalence-equivalence and nonequivalence-nonequivalence (Exps 1 and 2). These performances were not seen with any of the 5-year-old children (Exps 1-3) without first having the opportunity to match compounds with trained correct relations between elements and compounds with trained incorrect relations between elements (baseline-baseline, Exp 4). Present findings suggest a developmental divide similar to that reported in earlier developmental research on analogical reasoning for which equivalence-equivalence has been used as a model. Although equivalence-equivalence and classical analogies require Ss to match functionally same relations, the procedures for measuring equivalence- equivalence are suffiently different from those used in classical analogy tests, not to permit any direct comparisons.
