Preschoolers’ acquisition of producer-product metonymy

Preschoolers and Adults Learn From Novel Metaphors

“…Overall, the present experiment contributes to a growing body of literature suggesting that preschoolers may possess a relatively sophisticated ability to understand and use nonliteral language (Falkum et al, 2017;Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2020;Zhu, 2021;Zhu et al, 2020). Moreover, by demonstrating that preschoolers can make additional inferences from novel metaphors, the present research suggests that metaphors may be a powerful learning mechanism that could allow children to acquire new information.…”

“…Indeed, recent work showed that children develop sophisticated relational-reasoning abilities in their preschool years (Christie & Gentner, 2014; Goddu et al, 2020; Hochmann et al, 2017; Kroupin & Carey, 2022) or even earlier (Anderson et al, 2018; Walker et al, 2016; Walker & Gopnik, 2017). Moreover, additional research demonstrated that preschoolers understand other kinds of nonliteral language, such as metonyms (Falkum et al, 2017; Köder & Falkum, 2020; Zhu, 2021) and metaphors (Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2020; Zhu et al, 2020, in press). For example, 3-year-olds already understand metaphors based on perceptual similarities (e.g., “The bottle with the big belly” to refer to a round bottle over a slender bottle; Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2020) but not abstract-motion/space relations (e.g., “Time flies by”; Özçaliskan, 2005).…”

Metonymy as a Universal Cognitive Phenomenon: Evidence from Multilingual Lexicons

“…Several studies report that no additional processing cost is required for comprehending systematic metonymy, and late positivity (pragmatic adjustment) is observed only in the processing of circumstantial metonymy (Frisson & Pickering, 2007;Piñango et al, 2017;Weiland, Bambini, & Schumacher, 2014). Recent work further shows that prior experience of particular exemplars is not necessary for children to learn at least one kind of systematic metonymy: PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT as in 'I read Shakespeare' (Zhu, 2021).…”

Preschoolers and adults metonymically extend proper names to owned objects

“…In many natural languages, moderate-to-high-frequency words carry multiple related but distinct meanings (Apresjan, 1974;Copestake & Briscoe, 1995;Nerlich et al, 2003). These kinds of flexible word uses can take different forms, such as morphological conversions (e.g., noun-verb conversions; "I bought a hammer"; "I can hammer the nail"; Srinivasan et al, 2017), metaphors (e.g., space-time metaphors; "This is a long road"; "He took a long time"; Starr & Srinivasan, 2018, 2021, and metonyms (e.g., producer-product metonyms; "Raymond Carver wrote a poem"; "I'm reading Carver"; Littlemore, 2015). These kinds of semantic generalizations not only explain the multiple senses of existing words, but can also facilitate the creation of new word meanings in a lexicon (Srinivasan et al, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, while previous research suggests that children struggle to understand non-literal language (e.g., Winner et al, 1976Winner et al, , 1980, more recent work shows that preschoolers can already produce and understand various kinds of non-literal language, such as metaphors and metonyms (Falkum et al, 2017;Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2020;Zhu, 2021). The current research contributes to this growing body of literature on children's early-emerging capacity to use non-literal language, by showing that children understand novel metonyms that are not conventionally expressed in their everyday language.…”