ABSTRACT
The present approach rests on the assumption that metaphor is a cognitive rather than strictly linguistic phenomenon. The foregoing considerations guided the development of the Metaphoric Triads Task (MTT). The MTT has been administered to subjects varying widely in age, yielding steadily improving performance from about 7 years of age to adulthood. A series of training studies were conducted to determine whether mean levels of performance observed for various age groups represented maximal performance. Performance was further improved when children were provided with brief explanations of both metaphoric and nonmetaphoric pairings for a few items. Perhaps children need the kind of extra encouragement provided by a directive examiner before they will put useful information to work in performing a task—in the case, identifying the metaphorical pair. Virtually all of the sentences included enough information about the basis of the comparison to be evaluated in terms of the criteria employed in scoring standard MTT protocols.
