Developmental versus language-based factors in metaphor interpretation.

Abstract

This study examines the respective roles of language proficiency and more general developmental factors (e.g., mental capacity, knowledge) in children's metaphor interpretation. Subjects were Spanish-English-speaking and monolingual-English children from 7 to 12 years of age. The samples were English-speaking middle-class (n ffi 31) and working-class children (n = 34) and Spanish-English-speaking children who were either long-term residents (n = 39) or recent immigrants o Canada (n = 21). These samples were equal in measured mental capacity but differed on measures oflanguage proficiency in English. With a previously validated procedure, subjects ' metaphor interpretations were scored for cognitive complexity. Metaphor score in-creased with age, and the developmental curves were parallel across the four samples. For metaphor score, effects due to language or socioeconomic status were of small magnitude in relation to those due to age. There is a rich body of data describing developmental changes in ability to comprehend metaphors (for reviews ee

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.