Children’s understanding of referential nominal metaphors: a path to the heart of text comprehension

Abstract

ABSTRACT A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. “The seagull took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the thief”). The reference from the thief back to the seagull is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments and some empirical evidence that resolution of referential metaphors shares several of the core processes of general text comprehension. Two studies are reported. The first study found that resolution of referential metaphors is closely correlated to text comprehension and that ability to resolve referential metaphors contributes unique variance to reading comprehension over and above resolution of literal references. The goal of the second study was to explore in depth the inferential processes involved in the resolution of referential metaphors. This second study assessed the relative contributions of text-based (“bridging”) and knowledge-based inferences to the resolution of referential metaphors. The results support the assumption that resolution of referential metaphors requires a combination of these two types of inferential processes in addition to other components that are shared with text comprehension. Together, the two studies indicate the processing of referential metaphors shares inferential processes with general reading comprehension and thus open new theoretical and practical perspectives.