Metaphoric competence in cognitive and language development

Consideration of the age-related changes in children's language and cognitive development suggests qualitative changes in their creative language use. Many, if not most, researchers in the area have argued that some metaphoric competence emerges far earlier than would be expected on the basis of explanation or interpretation tasks alone. These same researchers, however, appear largely to have neglected consideration of the cognitive prerequisites for such abilities and differences between what is nonliteral for the adult and nonliteral for the child. If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground. Having stacked the definitional cards, we doubt that many investigators would assert that 2-year-old children at nonverbal symbolic play are doing anything that is literally metaphorical in our terms. But neither will we deny that one can observe creative components in the verbal and nonverbal play of the young child that are precursors of later nonliteral language skills (see McCune-Nicolich, 1981, for discussion). We simply do not see these creative abilities as specific to language in any way that justifies calling them metaphoric competence. Rather, the child's abilities to deal flexibly with the world, to "play" with possible alternative organizations of it, and to see similarity in diversity represent the bases of subsequent cognitive as well as language development. Far from being an exceptional aspect of development, apparently nonliteral language should be considered a fundamental tool in the young child's construction of both internal and external worlds (McCune-Nicolich, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978). If one is willing to accept that children's conceptual organization might not match that of adults, then what is appropriately called nonliteral language in the young child must be reexamined. We find it strange that researchers acknowledge differences, for example, in children's notions of animacy, and yet assume that errors of animacy attribution are figurative constructions indicative of an ability to supercede a level of analysis the child does not have.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)