Emergent Entailed Analogical Reasoning of “Same,” “Different,” and “Opposite” in Children with Disabilities

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We sought to evaluate a set of procedures based on Relational Frame Theory in teaching children with disabilities to reason analogically using relations between the contextual cues “same,” “opposite,” and “different.” Two children were first taught to respond to the relational cues using common pictures and were subsequently trained through an exemplar to correctly respond to analogies presented in an analogy matrix, based on the prior established relations. Two other children were exclusively trained to respond to analogies in the matrix without prior relational training. The children that received relational and analogy training could correctly respond analogically and the skill transferred to untrained analogies. Mastery was not observed in the control participants.