A Comparative Study Of Mandarin And English-speaking Children’s Development Of Metaphoric Competence

From the cognitive perspective, a metaphor is a systematic mapping acrossconceptual domains: one domain of experience, the source domain, is mappinginto another domain of experience, the target domain. The essence of metaphoris through understanding one conceptual domain in the light of anotherconceptual domain, which expresses that human life experience is thefoundation of metaphor. According to the definition, a metaphor is no longer amatter of language, but a means of thought and action for recognizing the world,which is pervasive in daily life. Preschool children can often speak some poeticlanguage which has a metaphor meaning. So what is the exact age whenmetaphorical ability firstly appears in preschool children? What is thedeveloping tendency with the growing of age? What are the similarities anddifferences between English and Chinese-speaking children? The research ofchildrern’s metaphoric ability as a milestone has great significance in children’slanguage development.With the employment of survey research method, statistical method, andlongitudinal observation method, the present study examines the overallsituation of early children’s metaphoric competence. The study covers52sessions chosen from two Chinese-speaking subjects MHR from the age of01;03;26to05;10;27and ZHZ from the age of00;10;19to06;00;29. It mainlyfocuses on the Initial appearing time, types, tokens and characteristics of simile,metaphor, metonymy, personification and hyperbole. Then an analysis about twosubjects Adam from the age of02;03;04to05;02;12and SAR from the age of02;03;05to05;00;10from Brown database, from the same aspects as the abovetwo Chinese-speaking is conducted. Finally, a comparative cross-sectional studyis conducted for the purposes of discussing what are the similarities anddifferences between English and Chinese-speaking children’s metaphoriccompetence.The major results are as follows:(1) Chinese-speaking children have the ability to notice similarities and produce and understand metaphors at the age of2, which is much earlier than English-speaking children who cannot producemetaphor until they are about3years old.(2)With the help of picture, theChinese-speaking children initially employ metonymy rhetoric to comprehendthe metaphoric meaning between unfamiliar things, but the English-speakingchildren initially get help from personification rhetoric.(3) The metaphorsproduced by children who are about two years old produced are based onpretended play (enactive metaphors) and perceptual grounds (sensorymetaphors). Children at a younger age produce more enactive metaphors, butmore perceptual metaphors are produced than enactive metaphors as they growolder when they are4years old.(4)The climax of metaphoric production is atthe stage of three to four years, both the number of Chinese-speaking andEnglish-speaking children’s metaphoric production declines with the age growth.(5) Five years old children’s metaphoric production declines greatly, becausethey have a more profound understanding for similarities and they fear to takethe risk of being criticized. Some similarities and differences are also foundbetween Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children in the metaphors andtheir metaphoric competence. In short, the development of children metaphoriccompetence is related to the age of the child, cognitive ability, languagecomplexity, the differences of language input and input frequency.