Abstract

This research is concerned with the development of metaphorical ability, conceived of as the ability to preserve conceptual relationships across changes in actual content. This view of metaphorical ability does not distinguish between analogy, metaphor and simile, but focuses rather on what I believe to be their common core. I define a metaphor or analogy as a mapping from one semantic region (the domain of origin) to another (the range of application) which conveys that certain semantic or conceptual relationships present in the domain are present in the range also. Further details of this model and of Experiment 1 are reported in Gentner (in press). The development of metaphorical ability is not well understood. The spontaneous speech of preschool children is full of seemingly metaphorical remarks. For example, a two-year-old says "Oh Mommie! How balloonie your legs are!" or (when undressed) "I' m barefoot all-over." (Chukovsky, 1968). It appears that not all these extensions arise from errors in the child' s word meanings (cf Thomson & Chapman, 1975). However, in experimental tasks designed to measure metaphorical ability preschool children acquit themselves rather poorly. Typical tasks used are interpretation of metaphors, such as "Can a person be soft? (Asch and Nerlove, 1960); or choosing among possible metaphorical and nonmetaphorical completions for completing sentences such as "Look at that boy standing over there. He looks as gigantic Performance on these tasks rises fairly steadily with age until adolescence. These results seem to indicate that metaphorical ability develops after the acquisition of basic language skills. The laboratory result that preschool children are poor at metaphor is at odds with the observation that novel comparisons are very common in their spontaneous speech. On closer examination, however, it appears that factors other then metaphorical ability are measured in these studies. One important factor is the children's conceptual knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the domain from which the metaphor is taken and of the domain in which it is applied. For example, if young children do not know the culturally agreed-upon systems of personality traits and emotional states