The aim of the project is to help us understand how monolingual and bilingual children acquire metaphors to conceptualise the world around them. Is metaphor acquisition rooted in our experience of the world, and so age-sensitive, and truly universal? Or is it language-sensitive and driven by caregiver speech and children’s own language abilities?

Monolingual data will be derived from the CHILDES Talkbank which contains transcripts of naturalistic recordings with both Polish and English children aged 2-6 and their primary caregivers. Bilingual data will be collected from 60 bilingual children recruited from Polish Saturday schools in London. Children will take part in two new experimental tasks, using visual stimuli controlled to elicit specific types of metaphors.

The project will produce three main outcomes.

1. It will fill the gap in our understanding of when and why children start to produce metaphors, an area practically absent from current research, especially that in bilingualism.
2. As bilingualism is associated with language deficiency and bilingual children are often placed in low ability sets in school, the project will shape positively teachers’ perceptions of migrant children, thus reducing their misplacement.
3. It will help to recommend educational interventions to grow metaphor use in bilingual speakers, improving these children’s access to UK education and their overall learning.