Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, UK.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;28(Pt 3):547-63. doi: 10.1348/026151009x454373.
Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy are common in our daily communication. This is one of the first studies to investigate metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a developmental approach. Forty-five typically developing individuals participated in a metaphor-metonymy verbal comprehension task incorporating 20 short picture-stories. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses linking task performance to either chronological age or receptive vocabulary (mental age, MA) were used to compare the development of metaphor and metonymy. Results showed that development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension is strongly linked with chronological and MA, but metaphor comprehension develops at a slower rate compared to metonymy. It was also found that participants, across all ages, consistently showed around 21% better performance on metonymy. The relationship between metaphor and metonymy comprehension is discussed in terms of linguistic and cognitive models of figurative language comprehension arguing that metonymy is cognitively more basic than metaphor.
隐喻和转喻等修辞在我们的日常交流中很常见。这是首次采用发展方法研究隐喻和转喻理解的研究之一。45 名正常发育的个体参与了一项隐喻-转喻言语理解任务，其中包括 20 个简短的图片故事。使用横断面轨迹分析将任务表现与年龄或接受性词汇（心理年龄，MA）联系起来，以比较隐喻和转喻的发展。结果表明，隐喻和转喻理解的发展与年龄和 MA 密切相关，但与转喻相比，隐喻理解的发展速度较慢。还发现，所有年龄段的参与者在转喻上的表现都要好 21%左右。根据隐喻和转喻理解的语言和认知模型，讨论了隐喻和转喻理解之间的关系，认为转喻在认知上比隐喻更基础。
