Reviews traditional theories of metaphor and attempts to provide a definition of metaphor that will serve the needs of empirical research. Suggests that a profitable approach might be to manipulate contexts to induce different interpretations of a target sentence. (MP)

To make teachers more aware of certain linguistic skills possessed by black children, why they are important, and how they might be capitalized upon in the classroom, this report examines the manipulation of figurative devices within the black community. The discussion focuses on seven forms of communicative devices prevalent in black language:…

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this paper is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes, but that actually underlies…

A total of 411 elementary school children seven to twelve years old read short prose passages and selected the most appropriate continuation sentence from four alternatives. The completion sentences were constructed so that the correct (target) response involved either an explicit (simile) or an implicit (metaphor) metaphorical comparison. It was…

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. In experiment one, the target sentences followed either short or long contexts which induced either literal interpretations or metaphorical ones. Results indicated that only in the short context…

Subjects ranging in age from 7 to 12 years selected correct story completion alternatives significantly more often when these alternatives were similes than when they were semantically equivalent metaphors, and when alternatives specifically denoted the referent of the metaphorical comparison than when the identity of the referent had to be…

The standard dictionary definition of a metaphor--a word or phrase applied to an object or concept that it does not literally denote in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept--is inadequate in that it does not deal with whole sentence metaphors and that it provides no way of distinguishing between a metaphor and a semantic…

Examined cultural and instructional influences on comprehension of figurative language ("sounding") by elementary school children in Harlem and studied effects of a program of creative writing instruction provided by visiting writers. Concludes that special instruction tended to improve figurative language comprehension of children and…

In a study investigating the hypothesis that verbal paraphrase and explanation tasks account for part of the difficulty that young children have with tests of metaphor comprehension, 32 six-year-old children were read short stories that ended with metaphorical sentences. Half of the children were asked to paraphrase the metaphorical sentences…

To discover whether increased exposure to and understanding of figurative uses of language would result in improved performance on a metaphorical language comprehension test, gains were measured on a figurative language test that was administered twice, approximately four months apart, to a total of 319 elementary school children in Harlem, New…