A Research On Children’s Metaphoric Competence

Metaphor is not only a figure of speech but also an important cognitive tool and wayof human thought. Influenced by this cognitive view of metaphor, the ability of human tocomprehend and produce metaphor raise scholars’ interest at home and aboard. In last tendecades, metaphoric competence (MC) gradually become the focus of internationalcognitive linguistics. Children’s metaphoric competence research is an important aspect.Conducting children’s metaphoric competence research can help us know the characteristicsof children’s cognition and foster children to improve comprehensive competence. Whilethere are lack of children’s metaphoric competence researches especially empiricalresearches in china, only a few scholars such as Zhou Rong (2001), Bai Fengyu (2008) havemade some contribution. Metaphor comprehension of pre-school children is the focal pointof children’s metaphoric competence research in china. School-age children and metaphorproduction are neglected. Quiet few researches focus on metaphor competence (includingmetaphor comprehension and production) of pupils in grade four to six who are at thetransition stage (from childhood to adolescence). Thus this empirical research onmetaphoric competence of children in grade four to six is endowed with some theoreticaland practical significance.This thesis investigates metaphoric competence of one hundred and fifty pupils ingrade four to six through assigning test paper in order to figure out the following questions:a) What are the general picture and the developmental trend of children’s metaphoriccompetence? b) What are the developmental trend of children’s metaphor comprehensioncompetence(MCC) and metaphor production competence(MPC)? What are the similaritiesand differences between them? c) How do variables age, gender and language proficiencyaffect MCC and MPC? The metaphoric competence test paper is designed by the authorsince there is not unified one at present. The final test paper adopted in this research isrevised based on results of two pilot tests. It is not only proved to fittable and workable fortestees but also verified to be of high reliability and validity. Data obtained are analyzed in SPSS16.0and related results are concluded: a) children in primary grade four to sixdevelop MC to certain level and the developmental trend of their MC is linearly increasing;b) generally their MCC and MPC grow with grade; they perform much better in MCC testthan MPC test; c) variables age, gender, and language proficiency (LP) all have influence onMC; LP has great influence on MCC while age and gender show significant influence onMPC. Besides, difficulty and conventionality are found to have effect on MCC. The maineffect of conventionality is found to be obvious. Metaphorical expressions are found toaccount for high percentage in data of MPC test. But these metaphorical expressions arefound to be lack of comprehensibility and appropriateness. Nature landscape orphenomenon, animal and its body, food, objects, and plants are calculated to be five maincategories chosen by children as source domain. At last, some implications on children’sMC cultivation and MC researches are given.