Sources of Difficulty in the Young Child's Understanding of Metaphorical Language

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Abstract
In experiments to examine children''s understanding of metaphorical language, preschool, 1st-grade and 3rd-grade children heard short stories ending with a metaphorical sentence describing an action. They were then asked to act out the stories and the metaphorical sentences using toys in a specially constructed "toy world". Metaphor comprehension was assessed on the basis of the children''s enactments. The experiments manipulated the predictability of the story endings given the already established context, and 2 aspects of the complexity of the metaphorical sentences themselves: the verb of the the metaphorical sentence (literal vs. nonliteral verb), and the explicitness of its comparative structure (simile vs. metaphor). Results showed that both the predictability of the story endings and the complexity of the metaphorical sentences had a marked effect on the difficulty of the metaphor comprehension task. The data were interpreted as supporting the view that success or failure in comprehending metaphorical language depends on the overall dfficulty of the comprehension task, conceptualized in terms of the interactive effects of different difficulty sources, rather than simply on the fact that a linguistic input requires a metaphorical interpretation. The experiments also identified some of the conditions under which even preschool children show evidence of metaphor comprehensions, and clarified aspects of the development of metaphoric competence.