Creative use of metaphors in four year olds
Knowledge of metaphors is crucial to children's abilities to engage with all areas of the curriculum. Recent years have witnessed a revived interest in children’s abilities to understand novel metaphors at the start of their primary education; however, studies in novel metaphor production have been extremely rare, probably due to lack of rigorous methods for eliciting novel metaphor use from young children. To capture children’s early abilities to generate such metaphors under experimental conditions, we ask whether priming children with exposure to similar but conventional items can help them develop a generalized prediction of the suitable type of metaphoric expression they should use in the novel condition as early as at the age of four (RQ1), and whether these abilities are consistent with the size of their expressive lexicons (RQ2).
Methods
We will test 68 monolingual English-speaking four-year-olds in mainstream primary schools using two methods. Half the children will first see pictures for three conventional metaphor primes (e.g., leg of a table, head of a flower, arm of a chair), which will be conceptually related to the novel metaphor we will expect them to generate at the end (e.g., hair of a carrot). We will point at, and name, elements of the first three pictures and then ask the child to name the element pointed at in picture four. The other half will be shown the same three pictures as primes, but we will name those elements of the pictures (e.g., top of a table, leaf of a flower, seat of a chair) which are conceptually unrelated to the final novel metaphor (e.g., hair of a carrot). This will be a control condition for the one described previously. Overall, it is expected that the conceptually related expressions children hear as primes will be more successful in scaffolding the elicitation of novel metaphors as they will allow children to develop a generalised prediction of what kind of expression to use in the novel condition.
Principal Investigator
Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
Investigator
Professor in Psychology and Language Development