ABSTRACT
An empirical study of children’s metaphor comprehension is presented that focuses on developing a nonverbal measure of preschoolers’ understanding of simple concrete metaphors. It was expected that children would show sensible depictions of topic-vehicle interaction even though they probably would not be able to paraphrase or explicate the metaphors. In addition to directing attention to new aspects of metaphor abilities, the realist approach has several theoretical advantages over an indirect or mentalist approach to meaning in language. Children readily used the pictures in response to the metaphors, but they almost never answered the question of why the speaker said the metaphor or what the metaphor meant with paraphrases of the metaphors. However, the components of metaphor are all present, including the possibility of topic-vehicle interaction. The idea that topic and vehicle domains interact so that when a metaphor has been comprehended both topic and vehicle meanings have been affected has been useful in psycholinguistic work with adults.
