6 Metaphors

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A photograph of Paul Grice with a speech bubble saying the following: ‘Maxim of manner - be clear. Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Be orderly.’

The opposite of avoiding obscurity and ambiguity might be considered the kind of figurative and metaphorical language used in poetry or rhetorical prose. In fact, metaphorical language is part of everyday language in its most basic sense of some comparison between two terms while recognising that the two terms belong to different categories. For example, if a speaker says, ‘John is a lion’, they do not want the listener to think that John is a lion, rather that he shares certain features with a lion, such as being brave, strong and fierce. The study of children’s metaphorical language has been almost as long as the history of developmental psychology itself.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, known for his work on child development, observed his own daughter, Jacqueline, between the ages of 3 and 4 years old, and recorded her figurative talk: ‘It’s like a machine for putting in petrol’ for a bent twig; ‘It’s an insect in its cage’ for a caddis-fly in a stream, and ‘It’s like a snake’ for a winding river (Piaget, 1962, cited in Gibbs, 1994, p. 399). It is debatable whether all of these examples are fully adult-like metaphors, but it is clear that children have figurative ways of referring to the world from an early age.

Research has shown that children can begin to produce simple metaphors from as young as 2 years of age (Billow, 1981). These typically involve perceptual similarity comparisons (e.g. a ball is like an apple) or things that do a similar job (e.g. a knife is like a fork because they are both items of cutlery). Young children find metaphorical comparisons based on physical or perceptual similarity easier to understand than those based on abstract and complex relations. For example, in explaining the metaphorical statement ‘a cloud is like a sponge’, 5-year-old children typically rely on feature-based similarity (e.g. ‘they are both round and fluffy’) while older children and adults opt for more relational explanations (e.g. ‘they both contain water’) (Gentner, 1988).