A Survey Of Chinese Preschoolers' Early Metaphors And Metaphoric Competence

Children's early metaphors and their development of metaphoric competence provide precious research data. Since 1960s researches and experiments have been done to study children's metaphoric development. However, few researches have been done in China in this field.Scholars as Piaget, Inhelder consider metaphoric competence a very late development while other scholars as Gardner, Gentner and Winner state that from a very early age (nearly 3 years old) children can produce and comprehend metaphors. Chinese children as early as 2 to 3 are found to have the ability to notice similarities and produce metaphors. They can also comprehend metaphors familiar to them with pictures but their ability to explain them emerge quite late. However the positive effect of image declines when children are about the age of 6 to 7. The metaphors children produce are based on symbolic play (enactive metaphors) and perceptual grounds (sensory metaphors). Children at a young age produce more enactive metaphors and as they grow older more perceptual metaphors are produced. Some studies show that there exists a "literal stage" after which the metaphor production especially that of novel ones declines greatly. In fact only in the classroom or school-related tasks did they produce fewer metaphors. That is because they fear to take the risk of being criticized. A general view and the characteristics of Chinese preschoolers' early metaphors and metaphoric competence are gained through survey. Some similarities and differences are also found between Chinese and foreign preschoolers in the metaphors they produce and their metaphoric competence.