Development and Understanding of the Metaphor among the Children of the Preschool Age

Abstract

Apart from being conditioned by cognitive development, the development, understanding and use of the metaphor influence not only linguistic development in terms of enriching and structuring vocabulary and semantics, but also the general verbal ability of every individual. The aim of our research was to examine the development and understanding of the ability for drawing comparisons and language metaphors in children of preschool age. We also tried to determine whether there were differences in this respect regarding the gender of the students. The research sample consisted of 81 children of age 6-7 from different preschool institutions in Belgrade. The development and understanding of metaphors were tested by applying the subtests “Comparison and Metaphorical Transfer of the Lexical-Semantical Test” written by Z. Kašić. The obtained results indicate that preschool children possess a developed ability for drawing comparisons. The results are also indicative of the fact that the metaphor exists in the language of preschool children, but it is not fully developed nor understood. The research also established that there were no differences relative to the gender in the level of adoption of comparisons and metaphors. Given the children’s age and the fact that the understanding of different events, actions and activities is directly linked to understanding metaphorical structures, the lower achievement of the preschool children can be attributed to a gradual development of the metaphorisation ability. Such findings were expected.

Keywords

• metaphorisation
• comparison
• language metaphor
• preschool age
• children