Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point at pictures that best illustrated the metaphoric expression. The results were examined through a mixed ANCOVA, testing the effects of chronological age, metaphor type (primary, perceptual) and metaphor conventionality (conventional, novel) on metaphor comprehension. Children could understand some metaphors just after their third birthday, and their comprehension increased with age. Children’s performance was somewhat better on primary than perceptual, and much better on conventional than novel metaphors. These findings are discussed in light of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008) and structure mapping theory (Gentner & Markman, 1997), confirming differences in the acquisition of different metaphor types.

中文翻译：

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阿拉伯语习得中的隐喻理解


隐喻是儿童如何概念化周围世界以及如何参与社交和教育的关键。本研究调查了 3;01-6;07 岁的典型阿拉伯语儿童的隐喻理解能力。 87 名儿童接受了一项新开发的任务，其中包含 20 个叙述的故事，并被要求指出最能说明隐喻表达的图片。通过混合方差分析对结果进行了检验，测试了实际年龄、隐喻类型（初级、感知）和隐喻常规性（传统、新颖）对隐喻理解的影响。孩子们在三岁生日后就可以理解一些隐喻，并且随着年龄的增长，他们的理解力也会增强。孩子们在基本隐喻上的表现比感知隐喻要好一些，在传统隐喻上的表现比新隐喻要好得多。根据概念隐喻理论（Lakoff & Johnson，2008）和结构映射理论（Gentner & Markman，1997）对这些发现进行了讨论，证实了不同隐喻类型习得的差异。