Metaphorical developing minds: The role of multiple factors in the development of metaphor comprehension

Abstract

Metaphor understanding is traditionally thought to emerge late in childhood. Although recent findings suggest that even pre-schoolers can understand metaphor in more age appropriate paradigms, it is still unclear which skills scaffold the development of metaphorical abilities. Metaphor comprehension is a complex process relying on multiple cognitive abilities with different developmental paths, such as Alternative Naming (i.e., accepting two labels for the same referent) and Analogy Perception (i.e., detecting similarities across objects). These two abilities may prove crucial to explain the development of metaphoric competence because difficulties in one or both of them may impose additional demands linked to children's general cognitive development. This might contribute to slow down the development of metaphor understanding. This study aims at teasing apart the contribution of Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception in the development of metaphor understanding. Using a unified picture-matching paradigm, we tested 3-and 4-year-olds in three tasks: Metaphor Comprehension, Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception. Results reveal that children with better alternative naming and analogical abilities show a better performance in the metaphor task, suggesting that both Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception play a role in the development of metaphoric competence.

The development of simile comprehension: From comparison to scalar implicature.

“…The results of the Metaphor condition replicated previous findings of a literal bias in young children, supporting our predictions: preschoolers (ages 3-5) and first graders (age 6) showed a reliable preference for the literal interpretation, whereas older children (age 13) appreciated the ambiguity in the categorization statements, giving a comparable number of literal and metaphorical responses. It must be noted that the clues used in this game were not contextualized and were therefore not a fair assessment of young children's abilities with figurative language (see Di Paola et al, 2019;Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2019). What can be concluded from these results, however, is that in the absence of context, it is not until after age 6 (and perhaps not even until middle school) that children appreciate the literal-metaphorical ambiguity inherent in the clues.…”

“…Recent metaphor studies employing more child-friendly procedures have also revealed improved performance in preschoolers (Rubio-Fernandez & Grassmann, 2016;Di Paola et al, 2019;Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2019) compared to the metalingustic judgements that were required to succeed in early metaphor studies (see Vosniadou, 1986). In the present study, the enhanced pragmatic performance observed in the simile condition relative to the metaphor condition might seem to suggest that preschoolers are able to derive scalar implicatures before they can interpret metaphors.…”

“…Children's ability to compare members of different categories has been studied in various areas of communicative development, ranging from early overextensions (e.g., referring to a horse as a 'doggy'; Clark, 1973;Bloom, 2002;Gershkoff-Stowe et al, 2006) to pretend play (e.g., playfully referring to a bucket as a hat; Winner et al, 1979, Hudson & Nelson, 1984Vosniadou, 1987a) and, centrally, to the comprehension of similes and metaphors (Vosniadou et al, 1984;Seidenberg & Bernstein, 1986;Di Paola et al, 2019). Both similes and metaphors require comparing members of different categories (as in examples (a) and (b) below), whereas literal comparisons and categorization statements are applied within the same category (as in (c) and Studies on metaphor and simile comprehension report that for young children, similes are easier to interpret than metaphors, probably because the comparison is made explicit (Reynolds & Ortony, 1980;Vosniadou & Ortony, 1983;Vosniadou et al, 1984;Seidenberg & Bernstein, 1986;Happé, 1995).…”

Meaning Variation in Metaphorical Expressions of the Tegalan Oral Literature: A Pragmatic Approach

“…However, we need to understand that the ability to interpret the meaning of metaphoric expressions is not easy because it is so complex and therefore we need to understand different age developmental pathways (Di Paola, Domaneschi, & Pouscoulous, 2019;. This requires time and a learning process for intercultural meanings because metaphoric meanings always show contra-meanings between words used in an expression and the meanings they refer to.…”

Irony and Perspective-Taking in Children: The Roles of Norm Violations and Tone of Voice

“…The idea of the existence of a literal stage has been criticized in connection with the growing evidence, gleaned from studies focusing on metaphor comprehension, that attests to the presence of a figurative language competence emerging as early as the preschool years ( Deamer, 2013 ; Di Paola et al, 2020 ; Pouscoulous and Tomasello, 2020 ). However, in a recent study of metonymy comprehension using an offline picture selection task, Falkum et al (2017) found a U-shaped development, with 3-year-olds performing better than 4- and 5-year-olds, who tended to interpret metonymic uses literally (e.g., choosing a picture of a mustache instead of the man with the mustache for “ The mustache sits down at the table”).…”