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The Comprehension Of Metaphor By Preschool Children: Implications For A Theory Of Lexicon, Barbara Pearson

Barbara Zurer Pearson

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52 children ages 3;0 to 5;2. Repetition performance on metaphors was compared to repetitions of semantically well-formed literal sentences as well as semantically anomalous sentences, all matched for length, vocabulary and sentence structure. Accuracy on literal and metaphoric stimuli were comparable and both were significantly better than performance on anomalous sentences. There were no effects for age or sex. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomalous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. The argument is …