{"pk":29787,"title":"4- and 5-Year-Olds’ Comprehension of Functional Metaphors","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Previous work suggests that children’s ability to understand\nmetaphors emerges late in development. Researchers argue that\nchildren’s initial failure to understand metaphors is due to an\ninability to reason about shared relational structures between\nconcepts. However, recent work demonstrates that causal framing\nfacilitates preschoolers’ relational reasoning. Might causal framing\nalso facilitate preschoolers’ metaphor comprehension? In\nExperiment 1, we presented 128 4- to 5-year-olds with a novel\nmetaphor comprehension task, following a causal warm-up task,\ncontrol warm-up task, or no warm-up task. In the novel\ncomprehension task, preschoolers rated functional metaphors and\nnonsense statements as smart or silly, and provided explanations.\nPreschoolers ranked metaphors as “smarter” than nonsense\nstatements, and a quarter of preschoolers provided functional\nexplanations. There was no effect of warm-up tasks. In Experiment\n2, we validated the metaphor comprehension task with adults.\nOverall, the current work presents a new paradigm that\ndemonstrates preschoolers’ capacity to understand functional\nmetaphors.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"metaphor; relational reasoning; language acquisition"}],"section":"Poster Session 2","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14r5z8f6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Rebecca","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Mariel","middle_name":"K.","last_name":"Goddu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Alison","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gopnik","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29787/galley/19641/download/"}]}