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…

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…