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Two experiments provide strong evidence that very young children are capable of constructing the meaning of metaphors pertaining to psychological phenomena, even when not given opportunity to derive the meaning of the metaphor from context alone. Subjects at all ages from five years to college age were able to achieve above-chance levels of performance. (RH)

Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Sixty-nine teachers of deaf and multihandicapped deaf children in a school were administered the Purdue Teacher Opinionaire, a standardized device used to measure teacher morale. Among results was that teachers of younger multihandicapped students had significantly higher morale than other groups. (Author)

This study investigated the extent to which children's metaphor comprehension was affected by context. Seventy-two participants at each of four age levels (first, third, and fifth grades and college) interpreted 12 metaphors embedded in story contexts that primed an emotional meaning consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with regard to the emotional meaning of the metaphor. Although the college students performed better than the children in some respects, even the youngest children demonstrated an ability to adjust their metaphoric interpretations to reflect contextual influence. These findings suggest that children as young as 6 years of age exhibit skill with metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphor is conceptualized as an ambiguous event with respect to meaning. A theory of ambiguity and of the resolution of ambiguity is presented. The theory assumes that each individual has a theory of the world that is used as a conceptual framework to assign meanings to empirical events experienced by that individual. The theory suggests an approach to studying the development of metaphorical conceptualization, and some research results related to children's comprehension of metaphor are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study to investigate the relationship between the intellectual level and the ability to learn paired associates in the U.S. The findings of the study indicate that normal individuals would perform better than retarded individuals. It was also found that verbal reinforcement did not affect the performance of both groups on the task.