Conceptual Domains and the Acquisition of Metaphor

This article explores how increasing knowledge in conceptual domains influences the development of metaphor. Two areas of prior research motivated the current study: The notion that many metaphors involve the juxtaposition of conceptual domains rather than merely the terms explicitly used in the metaphor, and the suggestion that historically, once one novel metaphorical relation is made between two domains, shortly thereafter several other metaphorical relations between those domains will also be used. Children at grades K, 2, and 4 were assessed for their ability to comprehend metaphors between eight different pairs of conceptual domains. The ability to comprehend metaphors emerged roughly at the same time for terms within the same pairs of fields and often at very different times for metaphors from different fields, suggesting that metaphor ability develops on a domain-by-domain basis and as a function of the richness of knowledge in the two domains that are juxtaposed in metaphor.

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