UC Berkeley

Metaphors are ubiquitous in both everyday speech (e.g., “I was lost in a sea of people”) and creative literature (e.g, “A word is elegy to what it signifies”). Metaphors provide frameworks for reasoning about abstract concepts, influencing how humans attend to, remember, and process information. Metaphors are also a force for creative change across various disparate domains, for example by spurring the creation of new explanatory theories in science and new word meanings in language. While metaphors are a powerful tool for thinking and reasoning in adulthood, previous research suggests that children do not understand metaphors until quite late in development, by some accounts not until adolescence. However, using novel experimental paradigms, the current dissertation provides new data suggesting that children as young as four years of age can not only understand, but also learn from, metaphors.

Chapter 1 outlines previous research on the development of metaphor comprehension. Chapter 2 uses novel paradigms to demonstrate that preschoolers can understand metaphors based on shared abstract, functional similarities (e.g., “Clouds are sponges”; “Roofs are hats”). Chapter 3 explores whether preschoolers can select the most relevant metaphor to learn from, and finds that providing preschoolers with explanations can shift their metaphor preferences in a manner that is conducive to further learning. Chapter 4 shows that preschoolers can successfully use metaphors to make additional inferences about novel concepts. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the implications of this work for research in linguistic and cognitive development, as well as future directions.

Overall, this series of experiments suggest that children possess an early-emerging capacity to understand and use complex non-literal language. Moreover, metaphors may be a powerful cognitive mechanism that facilitates learning, even early in ontogenesis.