Body of knowledge and knowledge of the body: The early development of metaphor in bilingual children

Abstract

This paper investigates spontaneous ‘metaphors’ produced by two three-year-old children, bilingual in English and Hindi. It suggests that children's bodies, no matter which of their languages they use, provide them with durable analogical grids early on in language acquisition to process their inconstant environments. Such an embodied space for metacognitive exploration seems crucial as children bootstrap themselves into adult-like language use through productive and pleasurable processes of guesswork, first producing ‘mimic’ metaphors, malapropisms and puns around at age 3+ before they progress to the ‘true’ forms at about age 4+. In this connection, the paper proposes the new interactional measure of corrigibility or ‘hypothesis correction’ by caregivers and the subsequent acceptance of, or resistance to, this different hypothesis by children.