The role of analogy in the linguistic encoding of number and space.

Adjectives like ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘big’ and ‘small’ are often used to describe objects occupying space, but can also be used to describe other domains, like time and number (e.g. ‘the number of crimes was low this year’). The tendency for magnitude words to encode multiple distinct domains of experience raises the question of how they are learned, and whether children initially begin with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain or broad meanings which span multiple domains. In the present study, we asked 2- to 5-year-old children to associate a novel adjective (e.g., ‘blicket’) with either spatial or numerical magnitude, and then to extend the novel word to another domain. We found that children more easily applied the word to the labeled domain than the unlabeled domain, and that older children were more likely to extend the word between domains. These results suggest that children may begin with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain before analogically extending them between domains, and that general improvements in analogical reasoning in the preschool years may lead children to more readily spontaneously extend words between domains.