The development of the use and comprehension of metaphor by pre-school children

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the child's use of metaphor, a topic not yet been pursued by linguists concerned with the acquisition of language. The first section of this study is a historical sketch of metaphor from Aristotle to modern theorists. The next two chapters discuss the inherent importance of metaphor in artistic and in non-artistic thought. The fifth chapter presents studies of the child's comprehension of metaphor, while the sixth chapter presents data collected from children and from printed sources demonstrating the child's use of metaphor. The seventh chapter analyzes the data presented in the sixth chapter, and the eighth chapter presents the implications of the study, particularly in the education of young children. The argument of this dissertation is that young children who are capable of symbolic manipulation are also capable of metaphoric production and metaphoric comprehension if the metaphor relates to the realm of the child's experience. The findings of the research reveals that spontaneous metaphor, those noting similarity between disparate objects, emerge first in the child, followed by the emergence of simile. After the simile emerges, the more deliberate, proportional metaphor emerges. The methodology is standard in the field of psycholinguistics and child acquisition of language. There is a theoretical basis presented, Chapters III, IV, and V, in which the topic is surveyed in the existing scholarship and the pertinent topics, namely intentionality and comprehension, are discussed. Next, a report of the collected data, in this case drawn primarily from two subjects in detail, plus a control group of fourteen subjects as well as printed data from already published sources is presented, the models being E. V. Clark, Ann Peters, and Roger Brown, who have all published discussions of child language based on no more than three subjects. The analysis of the data argues for the existence and describes the emergence of the metaphor in the pre-school child.