Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While metaphors are an integral part of everyday speech, developmental studies on metaphor comprehension present very mixed findings. Some studies demonstrate successful metaphor comprehension only after age 10, while others show evidence of metaphorical understanding even at age 3. However, given the great variability in the types of metaphors and tasks used to assess children’s understanding, the exact age of development of metaphor comprehension remains unclear. Here we introduce a new paradigm for metaphor comprehension tapping into 3- and 4-year-olds’ ability to assess a non-literal statement as being either relevant or irrelevant to the discourse. Results demonstrate successful - albeit incomplete - metaphor comprehension in 4-year-olds but persistent limitations in 3-year-olds. Our study provides corroborative evidence to the early development of metaphor comprehension, while raising questions about the methodologies that could best showcase pragmatic skills during metaphor comprehension in early preschool years.