Children and Metaphors

Recent research on the development of children's abilities to comprehend and produce metaphorical language is reviewed.It is argued that this research supports the view that the ability to produce and comprehend metaphorical language emerges out of children's undifferentiated similarity notions and develops gradually to encompass a greater variety of conceptual domains.Although we do not yet have adequate theories of how metaphor comprehension or production develop, there is good reason to believe that this is a continuous, rather than a stage-like process, and that it is constrained primarily by limitations in children's knowledge and information processing abilities.Furthermore, it appears that the comprehension and production of metaphorical language involves transfer of knowledge from one conceptual domain to another which, on the one hand, depends critically on the conceptual knowledge the child already has, but on the other acts to enrich and advance this conceptual knowledge. Children and MetaphorsDuring the last decade we have witnessed a proliferation of research on metaphor.This research has changed many of our ideas about how metaphoric competence develops and about the cognitive and linguistic skills that allow this development to take place.