Over a three-year period, researchers at Harvard Project Zero investigated metaphoric abilities in children, documenting the development of their metaphoric production, comprehension, and preference, as well as the interrelationships among these skills. Two other areas of literary skills that were investigated were the child's understanding of nonliteral "tropes," such as irony and understatement, and the child's understanding of the role of fantasy and imagination in the construction of a fictional world. This report discusses the researchers' principal findings, placed in the context of previous work conducted in these areas of study. The first section of the report explores the development of metaphoric production including first metaphors, the decline of metaphor production in the elementary school years, and the production of analogies during the elementary school years. The second section discusses the development of metaphoric comprehension, with emphasis given to the ways children interpret metaphors and the misunderstanding of the metaphor as a problem of competence or performance. The three remaining sections explore the development of metaphoric preferences, understanding other kinds of figurative language, and understanding the role of imagination in constructing a story. Attached is a two-page reference list, along with examples of student responses to such metaphors as magical, metonymic, primitive, genuine, inappropriate, and incomplete. (HOD)