A connectionist account of the emergence of the literal-metaphorical-anomalous distinction in young children

Abstract

We present the first developmental computational model of metaphor comprehension, which seeks to relate the emergence of a distinction between literal and non-literal similarity in young children to the development of semantic representations. The model gradually learns to distinguish literal from metaphorical semantic juxtapositions as it acquires more knowledge about the vehicle domain. In accordance with Keil (1986), the separation of literal from metaphorical comparisons is found to depend on the maturity of the vehicle concept stored within the network. The model generates a number of explicit novel predictions