Generating a metaphorical mindset in four year olds
Description
Knowledge of metaphors is crucial for children's abilities to engage with all areas of the curriculum. This psycholinguistic study will draw on tasks that involve listening to stories and pointing at pictures to address three main questions. First, it will determine to what extent four-year-old children can understand analogical metaphors based on a relational similarity (e.g., Sarah is a cactus). Second, it will examine what factors contribute to variation in children's metaphor abilities. Last, by drawing on work that trains four-year-olds on how to explain verbal analogies, it will gauge the need for, and the effectiveness of, a potential intervention programme. Capitalizing on the fact that metaphors are only introduced into implicit teaching from the age of eight, and explicit teaching from the age of ten, our project holds the promise of showing whether children may benefit from earlier metaphor instruction that would facilitate their access to the primary curriculum.
Methods
We will test 102 monolingual English-speaking four-year-olds in mainstream primary schools using two methods. First, children will be asked to listen to novel metaphors embedded in stories and point at pictures that best illustrate the metaphors they hear. Their performance will be evaluated in light of the scores they achieve in a similar task based on conventional metaphors, as well as their scores in lexical comprehension and verbal analogy tasks.
Second, children will take part in an intervention training, with some listening to metaphorical meanings being explained to them (passive condition), and others being encouraged to explain metaphorical meanings independently to the researcher (active condition). Children’s performance in the post-test, in which they explain novel metaphorical meanings, will be compared by group (passive versus active).
Principal Investigators
Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
Professor in Psychology and Language Development