Children's Comprehension of Metaphor in the Pictorial and Verbal Modality

Abstract

A picture-superiority effect has been observed in studies of children's learning and memory. The present investigation examines whether this effect generalizes to the domain of metaphoric comprehension. The degree of pictorial-verbal consistency in that domain is also explored. Verbal equivalents of the items of the pictorial Metaphoric Triads Task (MIT) were constructed, and both were presented to 2nd-and 5th-grade children in a counterbalanced design. No picture-su-periority effect was found. In fact, for items containing configurationally-based metaphors (i.e., those based on perceptual similarity), the verbal form yielded higher levels of comprehension. For such items, words are more likely than pictures to insure appropriate encoding, a necessary if not a sufficient condition for doing well on the MTT. Pictorial-verbal consistency was found, indicating that the limited generality of metaphoric capacity previously observed in late adolescents can be extended downward to children in the early elementary-school years.