Metaphor Comprehension By Chinese Children Of 3,4 And 5 Years Old

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in metaphor as a central aspect of human language and cognition. Conceptual metaphor theory- originally proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) - triggered this interest, as it defined metaphor as one of the basic mechanisms with which we structure cognitive domains and understand abstract concepts. Within this framework, metaphor is treated as a systematic correspondence between a source domain, which serves as the source of vocabulary and conceptual inferences, and a target domain, to which vocabulary and inferences are extended metaphorically. The central hypothesis of conceptual metaphor theory is that metaphors are structured mappings between conceptual domains. The mapping is always unidirectional- from source to target domain- and the source domain is defined as being more closely related to physical experience, or as being more intersubjectively available as compared to the target domain.Situated within this framework, this study aimed to analyze young children's understanding of conceptual metaphors that used motion in space as the source domain (e.g., death approaches, love flows in one's heart, words swirl around in one's head). More specifically, it investigated developmental changes in metaphor comprehension, and examined whether this understanding varied depending on the target domain of the metaphor, or the novelty- idiomaticity of the linguistic form with which the metaphor was conveyed in order to describe the ways in which very young children learn this system of metaphors as they become native speakers of a particular language. Data were gathered using a neutral story comprehension task and a highly- predicative semi- structured interview from 30 Mandarin- speaking children at the age of 3, 4, and 5 (10 participants per age group), along with 10 adult native speakers. Analysis of the data suggested a three- stage developmental pattern, from a lack of metaphor understanding at age 3, to metaphor understanding in a neutral contextually supported situation at age 4, and to abstract reasoning about metaphorical mappings in a highly predicative context appearing at age 4 and completing at age 5.Compared with the previous research, firstly, this study based on more systematic comparisons across different target domains (death, emotion, auditory)is needed to provide a more complete account of the emergence of metaphor understanding in young children, especially Mandarin- speaking children. What's more, the experiment was elaborately designed to test whether context was one of the most important factors influencing children's metaphor comprehension: highly predicative vs. neutral context. In most cases, context inferences increase children's chances of comprehending the metaphor, but it is possible that in the study neutral contextual information may lead to inferences that are ambiguous with the metaphor's meaning and may thus hinder its comprehension. Moreover, this study deviated from earlier work by treating metaphorical thought as the ability to build structural correspondences between conceptual domains, and by focusing on a source domain (i.e., motion in space) that constitutes a basic sensorimotor experience for every developing human being. From very early ages on, children not only have first- hand experience, but also have perceptual and cognitive access to various image schemas that involve motion in space. Under the situation, the main expectation of the study was that verbal abstract reasoning about metaphorical mappings would emerge at a much younger age than as reported in earlier developmental work that started at 5- year- old.