PERCEPTUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS IN CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF PREDICATIVE VERSUS PROPORTIONAL METAPHORS: A DEVELOPMENTAL INVESTIGATION

MARILYN ADRIENNE NIPPOLD, Purdue University

Abstract

Although children's understanding of figurative language has been extensively investigated, particularly since the mid 1970's, several unresolved issues became apparent from a review of the literature in this area. Two such controversies--the difficulty of predicative metaphors in relation to proportional and of perceptual in relation to psychological--served as the basis of the present investigation. A multiple choice listening task was designed in which 7- and 9-year-olds (30 in each age group) were presented with four different types of metaphoric sentences: perceptual-predicative, psychological-predicative, perceptual-proportional, and psychological-proportional. After controlling for factors of memory and attention, syntactic structure, sentence length, semantic features, word recognition, and novelty of the stimuli, proportional metaphors proved to be significantly more difficult for the children to understand than predicative but perceptual did not differ from psychological in ease of understanding. Nine-year-olds demonstrated metaphoric understanding superior to that of 7-year-olds despite the fact that children of both ages were familiar with the underlying semantic features of the metaphors and recognized all topics and vehicles at a literal level. No significant interactions were found among any of the factors of age, syntax, or concept. These results suggested several topics for future research including an exploration into the cognitive and syntactic factors that may be involved in children's understanding of various types of metaphors and in the refinements that occur in metaphoric understanding as a function of age. Close examination of the number and saliency of overlapping features of the topic and vehicle of a metaphor might also be informative in isolating the factors that contribute to ease of understanding. Immediate educational implications are related to the fact that although proportional metaphors proved to be significantly more difficult than predicative, even 7-year-olds were capable of dealing with proportional metaphors when the underlying concepts and vocabulary items were well understood by children of this age. This suggests that metaphors may be used successfully by teachers in expressing concepts to children of this age.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Language arts

COinS