Two major trends on children’s skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children’s capability to comprehend novel metaphors (‘X is a Y’) in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection task, while also tracking their gaze. Further, given recent findings on the development of metonymy comprehension suggesting a U-shaped developmental curve for this phenomenon (Köder & Falkum, 2020), we aimed to determine the shape of the developmental trajectory of novel metaphor comprehension, and to explore how both types of data (picture selection and gaze behavior) relate to each other. Our results suggest a linear developmental trajectory with 6-year-olds significantly succeeding in picture selection and consistently looking at the metaphorical target even after question onset.

中文翻译：

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那孩子是一只蚱蜢！ 3至9岁的隐喻发展


儿童理解隐喻技能的两个主要趋势主导了有关该主题的文献：文字阶段假设与早起的鸟儿假设（Falkum，2022）。我们的目标是通过儿童友好的图片选择任务来测试儿童理解西班牙语中的新隐喻（“X 是 Y”）的能力，同时跟踪他们的目光，从而为这场辩论做出贡献。此外，鉴于最近关于转喻理解发展的发现表明这种现象存在 U 形发展曲线（Köder & Falkum，2020），我们的目的是确定小说隐喻理解的发展轨迹的形状，并探索这两种类型如何数据（图片选择和注视行为）相互关联。我们的结果表明，6 岁儿童在图片选择方面取得了显着的成功，并且即使在问题出现后也始终如一地关注隐喻目标，这是一个线性的发展轨迹。