Metaphor comprehension in preschool children

Metaphors, as part of figurative language, are a common part of children's content (e.g. books, cartoons); thus, it is vital to investigate how much children understand them. To assess preschool children's psychological metaphor comprehension, several ambiguous stories with metaphorical phrases were prepared. Children were asked to identify the emotion of the story character (revealed in the metaphoric phrase) by choosing the correct picture. Children's metaphor comprehension was investigated in relation to individual differences in cognitive abilities and metaphor-related factors. Children were more likely to choose the picture depicting the correct emotion revealed in the metaphorical phrase compared to distracters and incorrect pictures. Furthermore, a positive relationship between executive functioning (EF) abilities and metaphor comprehension was found, while no correlation was found with children's tendency to pretend play or language complexity. Analyses partially supported that when the context the metaphor is presented in is easier, children show more comprehension, and, the performance with the more familiar metaphors was higher than the less familiar metaphors. Looking at the interaction between EF and familiarity of metaphors, findings suggest that EF might have a more profound contribution to the comprehension of less familiar metaphors compared to more familiar ones. Overall, these findings replicate and extend the studies that suggest even preschool children can understand psychological metaphors and emphasize the importance of investigating the effects of cognitive and metaphor-related factors together to understand factors contributing to metaphor comprehension development.