I have written on young children and poetry in English. Marie Luise Rau has written more extensively on young children and German and metaphor. Her book is Kinder von 1 bis 6: Bilderbuchrezeption und kognitive Entwicklung (Peter Lang Edition) 2013, which i'm afraid i have not read, but know it is largely about metaphor.
I think that any acquisition is relevant.
Briefly:
If that is a smile, it should indicate that the little creature has already memory an he can recognize smth. or smbd., and feels solidary with a group viz. safe, or he want to earn the thrust of a potential enemy, whitch he identified as such.
The acquisition of metaphor means, i think, reaching the level at which the little being has realized that the language do nor overlap with the reality, nor with the thinking. In fact, the metaphor is rather the attempt to comprehend the world than the result of understanding it.
A lot of my work is on the child's understanding of reality (I think Piaget got it all wrong...) it's in Stories, Pictures and REality (Routledge 2007) and i've done a number of papers on it too, which may or may not be downloaded her - can't remember. i know my daughter's first metaphor was from Blueberries for Sal, when she (Rebecca) jumped off our high bed and said 'i fell down like a blueberry in a pail'. at something like 2y6m. Virginia
Virginia,
It did not occur to me to think about the relevance of the acquisition of simile and metaphor. The question is resolved, with metaphor as a universal of human cognition. They are necessary. Simile and metaphor are part of a crowning process, whereby human represented by children begin to map experiences of different kinds. It has been amply documented that children acquire them in action and language, and obviously in thought (See Gibbs 1994 and others for this).
Yes - my interest was in ones acquired from books, though i'm out of touch wiht current research. Mine is a case study one, but children, when i did the study, were not expected to be able to understand them - let alone make them up and use them - before Piaget's seven. Mind you this was 40 years ago.
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