Early birds: Metaphor understanding in 3-year-olds

To assess children's cognitive capacities to understand (rather than explain or paraphrase) metaphors, we investigated how 3-year-olds (n = 36; 3;0–3;3) fare with novel metaphors corresponding to their world knowledge and linguistic competences using a behavioural choice paradigm. In a game, pa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of pragmatics 2020-01, Vol.156, p.160-167
Main Authors: Pouscoulous, Nausicaa, Tomasello, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Children
Comprehension
Language development
Linguistics
Metaphor
Native language acquisition
Pragmatic development
Pragmatics
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Summary:To assess children's cognitive capacities to understand (rather than explain or paraphrase) metaphors, we investigated how 3-year-olds (n = 36; 3;0–3;3) fare with novel metaphors corresponding to their world knowledge and linguistic competences using a behavioural choice paradigm. In a game, participants had to give the experimenter one of two objects referred to by a metaphorical expression. Unlike what previous literature suggests, our results indicate that 3-year-olds are able to understand novel metaphors that are appropriate for their vocabulary and world knowledge, based on action measures rather than metalinguistic responses. We discuss how factors other than incompetence with pragmatic inferencing can explain difficulties with metaphor comprehension. •3 year-olds are able to understand novel age-appropriate metaphors in a behavioural choice task.•The ability to understand non-literal language seems to be in place at the earliest testable ages.•The ability to make this pragmatic inference appears earlier than children would typically pass a standard false-belief task.
ISSN:0378-2166
1879-1387
DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2019.05.021