A 3 x 2 x 2 x 10 factorial design (three levels of socio- cultural standing by two definition treatments by two item formats by ten analogy items, with repeated measures over items) was used (1) to determine the effects of providing students with definitions on their solutions of analogy items, (2) to determine whether providing definitions has differential effects on students of different sociocultural levels, and (3) to determine where in the solution process of analogy items differences in reasoning occur among students of different sociocultural backgrounds. An attempt was made also to determine whether students' rank orderings of alternative choices on analogy items could be predicted from knowledge of their ranked relatedness of the word pairs contained in the analogy items.