Gaskins Dorota, Rundblad Gabriella
Education, Communication and Society, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2023 Aug 1;14:1162486. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1162486. eCollection 2023.
Metaphor acquisition research has focused mostly on metaphor comprehension in monolingual children. Ours is the first study to examine metaphor production in young bilinguals. A quantitative method was employed whereby sixty-two children aged three to six, with English and Polish, were tested on their ability to produce primary (e.g., a ) and perceptual resemblance metaphors (e.g., You're my ) in response to elicitation tasks. A univariate ANOVA revealed that the main factors to affect the production of conventional metaphors in bilingual children are their chronological age and their verbal skills in both English and Polish. No significant effect was found for nonverbal IQ, metaphor type, or testing language. These results are discussed in the context of both Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which has been concerned with the study of primary (and other conceptual) metaphors, and Structure Mapping Theory, which has focused on the use of perceptual resemblance metaphors. Usage-Based Theory is brought in to explain lexical effects in metaphor production.
隐喻习得研究主要集中在单语儿童的隐喻理解上。我们的研究是首次对双语幼儿的隐喻生成进行考察。采用了一种定量方法，对62名年龄在3至6岁、掌握英语和波兰语的儿童进行测试，以考察他们在引发任务中生成基本隐喻（如“a”）和感知相似性隐喻（如“你是我的……”）的能力。单因素方差分析显示，影响双语儿童生成传统隐喻的主要因素是他们的实际年龄以及他们在英语和波兰语方面的语言技能。未发现非语言智商、隐喻类型或测试语言有显著影响。我们将在概念隐喻理论（该理论关注基本隐喻（及其他概念隐喻）的研究）和结构映射理论（该理论专注于感知相似性隐喻的运用）的背景下讨论这些结果。引入基于用法的理论来解释隐喻生成中的词汇效应。
