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Understanding Visual Metaphor: Developmental and Individual DifferencesAuthor(s): Nathan Kogan, Kathleen Connor, Augusta Gross and Donald FavaSource: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 45, No. 1,Understanding Visual Metaphor: Developmental and Individual Differences (1980), pp. 1-78Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for Research in Child DevelopmentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1165832 .

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MONOGRAPHS OF THE SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN

CHILD DEVELOPMENT SERIAL NO. 183, VOL. 45, NO. 1

UNDERSTANDING VISUAL METAPHOR: DEVELOPMENTAL

AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

NATHAN KOGAN KATHLEEN CONNOR

AUGUSTA GROSS

DONALD FAVA

NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH



MONOGRAPHS OF THE SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT, SERIAL NO. 183, NO. 1

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION 1

11. DEVELOPMENT OF A VISUAL METAPHOR TASK 11

III. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND INTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK 19

IV. EXTERNAL CORRELATES OF PERFORMANCE ON THE METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK 36

V. TRAINING METAPHORIC THINKING 50

VI. CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 60

REFERENCES 71

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 76

APPENDIX: PICTORIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK 77



ABSTRACT

KOGAN, NATHAN; CONNOR, KATHLEEN; GROSS, AUGUSTA; and FAVA, DONALD. Understanding Visual Metaphor: Developmental and Individual Differ- ences. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1980, 45(1, Serial No. 183).

The development of an instrument-the Metaphoric Triads Task (MTT)-for the assessment of metaphoric comprehension is described. In the tradition of earlier cognitive-style research, a visual triad format was adopted that offered three possible pairings of pictorial stimuli, one of which was metaphorical in character. A subject's score reflects the number of metaphoric pairings formed (with appropriate metaphoric explanations) across all of the triads of the task. Data are reported for 12 samples of subjects (ranging from 7?2 to 28 years of age) who responded to the MTT in a diverse array of studies. Internal analyses of the MTT yielded satisfactory reliabilities (interjudge and internal consistency) and item-sum correlations. Sex differences were negligible, but progressive improvement in MTT score with age was noted. At the same time, a slight modification of the MTT triad format generated performance levels from younger children that approximated those of children 1-3 years older who had taken the MTT in its standard form. Higher MTT scores were generally obtained by those subjects who attempted more pairings, spent more time at the task, and chose the metaphoric pair as "best" among the alternative pairing possibilities. Correlations of MTT performance with standardized tests of intellective aptitudes and achievements were inconsistent across samples and between the sexes within samples. In contrast, MTT scores were quite consistently related to solving difficult analogies, generating high-quality responses to divergent-thinking tasks, and manifesting broad categorizing and physiognomic sensitivity. Significant correlations between the MTT and a set of verbal metaphoric triads offered convergent validational evidence suggestive of a general metaphoric style. Some relation was found between MTT performance and teacher ratings of figurative language appreciation and esthetic sensitivity, though it appeared that these might be mediated by



KOGAN ET AL.

the teachers' estimate of the child's overall capability. Finally, three experimental training studies were carried out. A requirement of exhaustive pairing and informative feedback on pretest items significantly enhanced the MTT performance of the younger children. The provision of appropriate verbal labels for each picture in a triad also significantly enhanced performance by insuring that children's encoding of the pictures was consistent with the metaphoric linkage in each item.



I. INTRODUCTION

THE CHOICE OF VISUAL METAPHOR

Metaphor in its most fundamental sense refers to similarity in the midst of difference. Yet, further reflection quickly reveals that such a definition is not entirely adequate. In typical concept-attainment tasks, for example, subjects deliberately search out the similarities among a diverse set of objects. Yet, no one would apply the label "metaphor" to that kind of abstractive process. Metaphor clearly entails a special kind of similarity, one that over- rides conventional category boundaries and brings together objects or events that normally belong to different domains.

Metaphor is typically expressed through the medium of words, and possibly achieves its ultimate expression in the figurative language of poetry. There is good reason to believe, however, that metaphor is a cognitive rather than a strictly linguistic phenomenon, for examples of nonverbal metaphor can readily be found. Such examples have often been subsumed under other constructs, but the link between such constructs and metaphoric operations would appear to be close. For example, synesthesia (e.g., Marks 1975, 1978; Osgood 1953, 1960) concerns cross-modality matching-that is, sensitivity to the similarities between visual, auditory, tactile, and other types of sensory stimuli. As Osgood notes, an exciting piece of music may be matched with a patch of red color or verbally described as "fiery." Though the former has typically been classified as synesthesia, and the latter as a musical metaphor, it is dubious whether different psychological processes are involved. Indeed, in a recent developmental study of cross-modality matching, Gardner (1974) has employed the term "synesthetic metaphors."

Another construct that overlaps with metaphor is "physiognomic perception" (Werner 1948; Werner & Kaplan 1963). This refers to the fusion of postural-affective states and objectively "neutral" stimuli (e.g., the attribution of emotional properties to line patterns). Wallach and Kogan (1965), for example, had children match emotions expressed in the Light- foot pictures (Engen, Levy, & Schlosberg 1957) with line drawings taken from Steinberg (1960). The children were also asked to describe various

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line drawings in words. Again, it is highly likely that similar psychological processes are at work, and it would certainly be reasonable to speak of

"physiognomic metaphors." It is then apparent that we are not doing violence to the constructs of

synesthesia and physiognomic perception when we place them under the rubric of nonverbal metaphor. Both rest on the capacity to define an event or object from one category in terms of the attributes of objects or events that belong to a different category. But one can extend the argument for nonverbal metaphor further by demonstrating the ease with which verbal

metaphors can be converted into nonverbal forms. Consider the statement, "The river lazily snakes its way to the sea." The comprehension of such a

metaphor can be readily examined in the visual realm by appropriate pictorial representations of a winding river and a coiled snake. An obvious reason for the ease of such a verbal-visual conversion is suggested by Ver-

brugge (1977). That author argues that figurative language is simply a vehicle to express the "novel perception of resemblances." In other words, figurative language evokes images, and it is the cognitive operation in this nonverbal realm that represents the mediating process in metaphor interpretation. A similar argument has been recently advanced by Paivio (1979).' This then further implies that one can study metaphor in direct perception without the use of language. Indeed, Langer (1948) has described metaphor as "abstractive seeing." Note further in this regard that psychologists in the Gestalt tradition (e.g., Arnheim 1949; Asch 1952; Kbhler 1937) have long emphasized the role of endogenous perceptual factors as mediators of metaphoric similarity.

Our decision to work with visual metaphor does not imply that we

necessarily consider this to be the best way to proceed in the present domain. We recognize that metaphor can be studied in sensory modalities other than the visual, but it has been our impression that auditory, tactile, and other sensory domains are simply less tractable from the standpoint of constructing stimulus materials of a metaphoric character. Similarly, we do not at all question that metaphor can be productively studied in its prototypical linguistic form, and there is in fact an extensive program of research in progress by Gardner and his associates explicitly directed to the developmental study of verbal metaphor (a review of this work is contained in Gardner, Winner, Bechhofer, & Wolf [1978]). Studies carried out thus far place a heavy

1 Research specifically directed toward the role of imagery in metaphoric comprehension has recently begun to appear. Harris, Lahey, and Marsalek (1980) have observed that subjects retrospectively report greater imagery for metaphoric than nonmetaphoric sentences even though the former are considered more difficult to cast in image form. Those authors also have described some vivid examples of images fusing the topic and vehicle of the metaphor in highly imaginative ways. For a less sanguine view of the importance of imagery comprehension, the reader should consult Riechmann and Coste (1980).

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emphasis upon qualitatively distinctive stages of metaphoric development and owe an obvious intellectual debt to the Piagetian tradition. As Billow (1977) has shown, however, the topic of metaphorical thinking can be examined from many different conceptual vantage points.

PICTURES VERSUS WORDS2

One of the dominant current concerns in cognitive and developmental psychology is the distinction between processing of pictorial and verbal stimuli. Given the authors' decision to concentrate initially upon visual (pictorial) metaphor, some consideration must be given to the implications of such a choice in the context of what we presently know about cognitive- processing differences between pictures and words. It is important to note that the foregoing distinction is relevant to at least two separate intellectual traditions, and these have not generated identical interpretive conclusions. Experimental child psychologists have carried out numerous studies devoted to age differences in learning and memory for pictorial and verbal information. Reviews of this research are available in several sources (e.g., Kail & Siegel 1977; Levin 1976; Pressley 1977; Reznick 1977). A reasonable con- sensus appears to exist to the effect that children are especially adept at processing pictorial information. Further, the superiority of memory for pictures over words is maintained into adulthood. Such a conclusion is certainly compatible with the use of pictorial stimuli for the developmental study of metaphor. At the same time, of course, it would be of considerable value to determine whether the picture-over-word superiority generalizes to the domain of metaphoric comprehension.

Hints of possible generalization can be derived from observations by Kail and Siegel (1977). Those authors note that verbal stimuli can be encoded denotatively (house as "building") or connotatively (house as "a place of warmth and security"). Connotative encodings appear to be relatively rare in children and frequent in adolescents and adults. Since metaphor necessarily involves connotative meaning, the limitation in the use of verbal metaphoric stimuli with younger children is immediately apparent. Pictures, in contrast, can be designed to accentuate connotative aspects (through the inclusion of expressive features of stimuli, e.g.), and hence pictorial metaphor might well be more accessible to children than verbal equivalents.

2 This heading acknowledges the untenability of the verbal-visual contrast as discussed by Gardner, Howard, and Perkins (1974). Those authors correctly note that verbal material can be visual as well as auditory, and the visual can be verbal or nonverbal. It is proposed that this confusion between media and symbol systems be remedied by adopting Goodman's (1968) distinction between notational and nonnotational systems. We have chosen not to employ the foregoing distinction in the light of its relative un- familiarity in the psychological community. Any reference to visual metaphor in this Monograph is intended strictly in the sense of pictorial depiction of metaphoric similarity.

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The notion that there can be direct pictorial and verbal equivalents is basically incompatible with ideas advanced by those belonging to the second intellectual tradition under consideration here. This tradition is an inter- disciplinary one, and deals with the relation of symbol systems and media in the contexts of communication and education. A volume edited by Olson (1974) is an excellent exemplar of the tradition. The guiding question is expressed in the following passage from Salomon (1974): "When roughly the same idea is represented in two different symbol systems, is the same meaning obtained from the messages?" (p. 393). The answer given to the question is a qualified "no." The media are presumed to affect cognitive processing beyond mere content, with the consequence that similar ideas expressed through the media of the printed word, still photos, and televised film would differ in the meaning extracted from each.

It is important to note that researchers in the foregoing tradition often make use of materials that are more complex and naturalistic than the simple verbal and pictorial stimuli typically employed in children's memory experiments. In this connection, Gardner, Howard, and Perkins (1974) dispute the contention that pictures are easier to process than words. Those authors assert that the pictorial mode is not inherently easier to read than the verbal- notational one, and one can in fact find or construct pictures that would be quite difficult for children. Kolers (1977) has in fact maintained that the contrast between reading as sequential and looking at pictures as holistic and instantaneous is not supported by evidence. Both involve scanning by the visual apparatus. It is distinctly possible, then, that relative ease of processing or learning pictures and words does not provide an adequate rationale for studying children's metaphoric comprehension in a pictorial rather than verbal medium.

There is another side, however, to the picture-word contrast. As both Gombrich (1974) and Gross (1974) have noted, pictures are attention induc- ing. To quote Gombrich (1974), "Say the sentence to a child and then show him the pictures and your respect for the image will soon be restored. The sentence will leave the child unmoved; the image may delight him almost as much as the real" (p. 243). Pictures are also especially suitable for expressing emotional responses, and hence one would expect this to facilitate understanding of physiognomically based metaphors. Indeed, metaphoric similarities that derive from a particular configuration of line and color may be virtually impossible to convey in words. We are suggesting, in other words, that the attentional and evocative qualities of pictures make them particularly apt for the study of children's metaphoric understanding.

Again, the emphasis on pictorially mediated metaphor in this Monograph simply represents a point of departure. The relation between the pictorial and verbal will eventually have to be explored, and later in this Monograph we report some limited beginnings in this direction. If Salomon (1979) is

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correct, it is unlikely that we shall find a particular symbol system generally superior. Rather, as that author has observed, outcomes will be contingent upon level of cognitive development, individual differences in preferred modes of processing, the particular content domain at issue, and the demands of the task situation. Researchers are now trying to unravel this complexity in a number of areas of cognition and learning, but we should like to stress that the research to be reported here is not a systematic examination of media and symbol systems as these relate to metaphoric understanding. It is our hope, of course, that this Monograph might stimulate such systematic research in the future.

LINKS TO OTHER COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTS

The senior author has for many years been concerned with individual differences in the cognitive functioning of children and adults, with particular emphasis on cognitive styles and creativity (e.g., Kagan & Kogan 1970; Kogan 1971b, 1973, 1976a, 1976b; Saarni & Kogan 1978; Wallach & Kogan 1965). Some of this work has been concerned with developmental and individual differences in the bases for judging similarity between objects and events. In the prototypical task, subjects are presented with stimulus arrays and asked to specify "what goes with what" or "what is like what" and, depending upon the nature of the task and the age of the subject, are requested to state the reason for particular similarity pairings or groupings. Resultant individual differences have been labeled "styles of conceptualization" (e.g., Kagan, Moss, & Sigel 1963). Three styles have been delineated, two reflecting similarity as a basis for grouping-analytic (common stimulus elements), and categorical (stimulus as a whole as exemplar of a class). The third style of grouping (complementarity) represents the attribution of a specific function or thematic relation between the stimuli and implies a rejection of similarity as a basis for grouping.

Within a more strictly developmental perspective (e.g., Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield 1966; Inhelder & Piaget 1964; Vygotsky 1962), the child's apprehension of similarity has been linked to the growth of logical thought. It hardly matters within such a theoretical context whether one employs geometric forms or real objects. Indeed, the hierarchical aspects of class inclusion can best be demonstrated with forms varying in such geometric attributes as shape, size, and color. These hardly constitute the kind of materials that lend themselves to metaphorical thinking. Where pictures of real objects and persons have comprised the stimuli for sorting, emphasis again has been directed toward either the child's use of superordinate logically based categories or the child's recognition of arbitrary common physical features (e.g., a rabbit and boy each portrayed with one eye). None of the tasks employed in the foregoing research has used stimuli that require

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subjects to make a metaphoric leap in order to achieve acceptable groupings. Conceivably, the child's capacity for metaphorical thinking has been slighted because the guiding conceptualizations and tasks employed have linked similarity to analytic and formal abstract reasoning. In analogous fashion, Gardner et al. (1978) have indicated how the emphasis on syntac- tics in developmental psycholinguistics led to a corresponding neglect of the phenomenon of figurative language.

It should be made clear that we are not maintaining that formal reasoning is irrelevant to metaphoric comprehension. Rather, we are insisting that appreciation of metaphor requires a distinctive form of reasoning, a form that is not tapped by the typical object-grouping or concept-attainment task. These latter tasks emphasize within-category similarity, each exemplar similar to one another by virtue of their common membership within a superordinate class.3 Metaphoric similarity, in contrast, is a cross-category phenomenon and can only be apprehended if objects and events typically unrelated are brought together by virtue of some shared feature.

The foregoing description of metaphor has much in common with the intent of "creativity" assessment by means of divergent-thinking tasks. In such tasks, the subject is presented with a particular stimulus-verbal or figural-and is asked to generate a multitude of ideas or possibilities appropriate to the stimulus. These are generally scored for ideational fluency, the number of responses generated. Uniqueness (i.e., statistical infrequency) of these responses has been scored also, but correlations with fluency have been quite high. In process terms, a divergent-thinking task taps the breadth of a child's similarity class; fluency is enhanced when there is greater tolerance for marginally appropriate instances (Wallach 1970). Though it is entirely feasible that subjects employ metaphorical thinking in generating ideas, the fact remains that the preoccupation with sheer fluency (an easily scorable objective index) has been at the expense of idea-quality assessments. If metaphoric sensitivity bears any relation at all to divergent thinking, the common link would clearly have to be the metaphoric character of the ideas generated in divergent-thinking tasks. The development of scoring systems for idea quality (Caudle 1975; Milgram, Milgram, Rosenbloom, & Rabkin 1978; Ward, Kogan, & Pankove 1972) will permit an examination of possible empirical links between metaphoric sensitivity and divergent-thinking performance. It must be noted, however, that divergent-thinking tasks require the production of ideas, whereas the present research is concerned with metaphoric comprehension. On this basis alone, one would not anticipate that correlations would be especially high. The major point at issue in the

3Rosch (1973) has demonstrated that, where natural categories are concerned, exemplars vary in their categorical "goodness of fit" and hence in their degree of similarity to one another. Though this is an important issue, it does not detract from the main line of argument advanced.

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present context, however, is the demonstration that divergent-thinking tasks cannot possibly be used as direct assessors of metaphoric competence.

Of course, cognitive styles and convergent thinking do not exhaust the dimensions of individual variation within the cognitive domain. The broad domain of intelligence offers an abundance of dimensions, but none can be considered to subsume metaphoric competence. Of most relevance, perhaps, is the area of analogical reasoning (e.g., Levinson & Carpenter 1974; Rumel- hart & Abrahamsen 1973; Sternberg 1977). There are currently two views regarding the relations between metaphor and analogy. Winner and Gardner (1977) have suggested that the appreciation of metaphor may "turn out to be integrally related to the capacity to engage in analogic thought." In a similar vein, Miller (1979) has argued that the conversion of metaphors into similes and analogies is an integral part of metaphoric comprehension. In contrast to the foregoing view, Ortony (1979a) has claimed that the explanation of metaphor in analogical terms is in no sense an adequate explanation. For, it is the nature of nonliteral similarity that has to be explained, and this can be just as much a characteristic of analogies as of metaphors. Indeed, Billow (1975) has cast analogies into a form that he calls "proportional metaphors." From the perspective favored by Ortony, then, metaphoric competence cannot be reduced to analogical reasoning as an explanatory device. That author has noted, however, that understanding of the processes involved in analogies as a problem-solving task poses quite a different theoretical issue than is represented by the processes underlying nonliteral similarity. For the present, then, it would seem most judicious to treat the relation between analogical reasoning and metaphoric understanding as open to further empirical exploration. Though research in the broad domain of intelligence has not uncovered a dimension directly reflective of metaphoric competence, we are prepared to accept the likely possibility that metaphoric understanding is not completely independent of other intellective functions.

EARLIER TEST-CONSTRUCTION EFFORTS

Before describing the procedure that we developed to assess metaphoric sensitivity, it is only fair that we provide a brief review of prior test-construction efforts in this field. Two types of work can be distinguished. One of these entails the construction of similes tasks with multiple-choice (Pearson & Maddi 1966) or open-ended formats (Schaefer 1971). The former is keyed for uncommon responses. Offered as alternatives to the simile "wise as," for example, are the customary ending (owl), a substitute ending similar in meaning (fox), a more remote ending of a "catchy" or alliterative nature (wizard), an opposite ending (fool), and a nonsense ending (wobble). Within a "preference for novelty" framework, the first two alternatives were

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keyed zero and the last three were keyed one (despite the vast differences in appropriateness among the three). Choice of the uncommon responses was correlated with other "preference for novelty" measures. The Schaefer Similes Test offers a set of incomplete sentences with instructions to provide three imaginative endings. The first item on Form I is, "The sun was as bright as.. ." Responses were reliably rated on a five-point quality scale. Similes Test performance yielded highly significant correlations with the verbal fluency component of divergent-thinking performance and with diverse measures of academic achievement.

Though there is a close correspondence between simile and metaphor, neither the Pearson-Maddi nor the Schaefer research is relevant to metaphor in the sense of a capacity to comprehend. The Pearson-Maddi task concerns individual preferences rather than capacities. The Schaefer test taps production rather than comprehension. The substantial correlations with ideational fluency and academic achievement raise questions about the discriminant validity of the latter instrument. It should be noted that neither of the similes tasks described has been explored from a developmental perspective. Further, neither task has had any apparent impact on subsequent metaphor research.

The other line of prior work of relevance to developmental and individual differences in metaphor comprehension concerns physiognomic sensitivity. Wallach and Kogan (1965, chap. 5) have reviewed most of the relevant research published prior to the mid-1960s, and hence there is no need for further discussion of that body of work here. There has, however, been one further development since the publication of that volume which is worthy of mention. Stein (1975) has published a Physiognomic Cue Test as a measure of a new "cognitive control principle." Most of the research based on that test has appeared in Rosett, Robbins, and Watson (1967, 1968). The test consists of 32 line drawings, each to be rated on a six-point scale, where the extremes represent a highly confident physiognomic versus literal interpretation of the drawing. Intermediate points reflect lesser degrees of confidence. A variety of correlations with other measures are reported in the test manual. It is sufficient for our purposes to note that the Stein instrument taps preferences, and these would seem to be especially susceptible to the effects of expectancies and demand characteristics. No research of a developmental character has been conducted with the Physi- ognomic Cue Test. As in the case of the research on similes described earlier, the Stein instrument has had a negligible influence on the study of metaphor broadly conceived.

THE NEED FOR A NEW INSTRUMENT

The foregoing review of research demonstrates rather clearly that there has not as yet been any systematic attempt to assess individual variation in

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metaphoric sensitivity or comprehension.4 Wallach and Kogan (1965) developed a number of physiognomic sensitivity tasks for elementary school children, but the content of such tasks reflects one limited component of metaphoric competence. As we have seen, research on particular cognitive styles has been very much concerned with individual variation in the bases for judging similarity, but the cross-category type of similarity relevant to metaphor has been neglected. Divergent-thinking tasks may engage metaphoric operations for some individuals, but these entail production rather than comprehension. The intelligence domain offers analogical thinking processes, but the evidence is not yet available to decide whether metaphoric understanding is little more than the capacity to reason analogically.

All of the foregoing clearly point to the possibility that the thorough mapping of cognitive dimensions by psychologists over a period of many years has not been completely exhaustive; metaphoric thinking may represent a significant gap. It can be argued, of course, that the neglect of metaphoric operations within the broad outline of cognitive and developmental research is merely a reflection of the esoteric nature of the topic. Such an argument, however, would be difficult to uphold in the face of the almost universal applicability of the metaphor concept. Conceptual analyses of metaphor can be found in the writings of art critics (e.g., Gombrich 1963), literary critics (e.g., Wheelwright 1968), philosophers (e.g., Arendt 1978; Black 1962), philosophers of science (e.g., Turbayne 1971), anthropologists (e.g., Sapir & Crocker 1977), linguists (e.g., Jakobson & Halle 1956), and psychoanalysts (e.g., Rubinstein 1972). Of course, psychologists have contributed conceptual analyses as well (e.g., Asch 1958; Brown 1958; Piaget 1962), and it is of particular interest to note that after almost 2 decades of relative inactivity, psychologists have returned to the topic of metaphor with renewed conceptual interest (e.g., Billow 1977; Gardner et al. 1978; Honeck & Hoffman 1980; Miller 1979; Ortony 1979a, 1979b; Paivio 1979; Pollio, Barlow, Fine, & Pollio 1977; Verbrugge 1977).

The multidisciplinary focus on the metaphor concept testifies to its central role in human endeavor. Yet, it is evident that the empirical study of metaphoric understanding in children and adults (particularly why some individuals are more skilled at it than are others) is exceedingly limited in relation to the magnitude of the conceptual effort. The major purpose of the present research is to try to narrow this gap somewhat.

Given the authors' interest in individual variation in the capacity for metaphoric understanding, the construction of a reliable measuring device became a central goal. This, in turn, carried the implication that develop-

4 There is a modest amount of research on developmental differences beginning with the classic study of Asch and Nerlove (1960). Recent reviews are available in Billow (1977); Gardner et al. (1978); Ortony, Reynolds, and Arter (1978); and Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio (1977).

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mental differences would have to be explored along a performance con- tinuum. Initially, we shall address the question of quantitative age differences on a global dimension of metaphoric sensitivity. Item-difficulty levels for various age groups will be examined also since different kinds of metaphoric relations may not exhibit the same developmental course. Throughout, however, the approach will be dimensional and, in that sense, quite different from the developmental stage perspective that Gardner et al. (1978) have brought to the study of metaphoric operations. Whereas the latter have searched for qualitatively distinct stages of metaphoric development, the present authors attempt to place metaphoric competence along an evaluative minimal-to-maximal scale. Given the relatively underdeveloped state of research in the area of metaphor, this wide divergence in approach must surely be welcomed. As research on the topic of metaphor proceeds, points of articulation will almost certainly be found.

With the adoption of the dimensional approach, the research strategy pursued is quite predictable, A multi-item instrument for the assessment of sensitivity to visual metaphor was constructed. Its reliability (internal consistency and short-term stability) was explored. Construct validity was examined by means of correlations of the metaphor instrument with a number of cognitive dimensions (some included for convergent, some for discriminant validational purposes). Extrinsic validation rested upon correlations between metaphoric sensitivity and teacher ratings on a variety of psychological dimensions (again, scales were included for both convergent and discriminant validational purposes). Age, sex, and demographic differences were examined. Finally, three modification studies were carried out to determine whether it was possible to enhance children's metaphoric understanding through short-term interventions.

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II. DEVELOPMENT OF A VISUAL METAPHOR TASK

CHOICE OF A METHOD

It sometimes happens that progress in a particular domain is impeded due to the lack of an appropriate technique for studying the phenomenon of interest. Conceivably, the exploration of children's metaphorical capacities has been inhibited by the difficulty of constructing a task that taps specifically metaphorical as opposed to other kinds of similarities. Given the senior author's background in cognitive-style research, there is probably little surprise in the choice of the method of triads. As described in Chapter I, this method has been successfully employed by developmental psychologists studying styles of conceptualization and is still in widespread use (see Kogan [1976a] for a recent review). Adaptation of the triads technique for the study of metaphor is relatively straightforward. Given a set of three stimuli that can be paired in three different ways, the obvious goal is to have one of the pairs manifest a metaphoric similarity while the remaining pairings are nonmetaphorical in character. Although prior use of the triads method for the study of conceptualization styles has typically requested subjects to provide only their most preferred pairing, there is no inherent reason why subjects cannot be asked to form as many pairings as they wish.' Whereas the former procedure elicits stylistic preferences, such multiple pairing offers the prospect of a capacity assessment. Though lack of metaphoric competence is suggested if a subject does not pair stimuli on a metaphoric basis under multiple pairing conditions, it must be acknowledged that other unforeseen task factors might also interfere with performance in the triads procedure.

There are several advantages to the triad method that deserve mention. With three viable pairing alternatives, the "demand character" of the task is minimized. When neutral instructions are employed, there is no reason for subjects to infer that the metaphoric alternative is the most highly valued.

6 Davis (1971) has strikingly demonstrated how developmental generalizations can radically change under conditions of exhaustive pairing relative to a condition requiring only the most preferred pair.

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Further, the presence of alternatives to the metaphoric (analytic, functional, categorical) implies that the child who is not metaphorically inclined can nevertheless perform adequately. The task was designed so as to minimize an experience of failure. Every effort also was made to devise the critical metaphoric pair so that alternative bases for pairing were not salient; however, 6 this could not always be accomplished for the more difficult metaphors.

There were other kinds of requirements that we expected our chosen task to meet. It was important that task items vary widely in difficulty, so that developmental differences across a broad age span might be explored. A final consideration was that the task be easily and reliably scorable by judges without extensive training. The rationale here was to make the task readily accessible to other researchers.

THE METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK (MTT)

Item Construction The initial stage of item building is a largely introspective process. A

large number of possible metaphoric similarities were considered. Given the focus on visual metaphor, only those possibilities that might lend themselves to pictorial representation were retained. In the case of each potential metaphoric pairing, we attempted to devise a third stimulus for the triad that was similar to each member of the metaphoric pair on some nonmetaphoric basis (e.g., analytic, categorical, or functional). This stimulus also had to be potentially convertible into pictorial form. Every effort was made to construct items in which metaphor assumed a cross-categorical form. Given a hierarchy of human beings, animals, plants, and physical objects and events, the members of the metaphoric pair for most of the items belonged to a different level in the hierarchy.

This initial phase of item construction generated 15 triads, each offering sufficient imagery to suggest that a pictorial representation might be feasible. We then consulted an artist, who in due course produced a set of preliminary pencil sketches. These were revised when necessary prior to the preparation of a set of 45 colored plates (each 21.6 X 27.9 cm) Further minor revisions of some of these plates were necessary. These 15 triads con- stituted Set I of the Metaphoric Triads Task.

As research with Set I proceeded, it became apparent that a larger number of triads would eventually be necessary in order to enhance the reliability of the task and permit a search for different dimensions of metaphoric sensitivity. Accordingly, the sequence of item-construction steps

6 It can be argued that subjects should be informed of the experimenter's intent so as to maximize performance. Given the difficulty of defining metaphor for young children, we chose more neutral instructions. In training studies (to be described later), we examined the effect of providing metaphorical examples upon subsequent understanding.

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described above for Set I was repeated. This yielded a new set of 14 triads, hereafter labeled Set II. Brief descriptive labels for the 29 triads are provided below. For each, the metaphoric pair is asterisked. The letters follow-

ing each item are explained later. Achromatic versions of the pictures (reduced in size) are shown in the Appendix.

SET I 1. violin*, singing canary*, tree (CC) 2. fish, winding river*, snake* (CF) 3. man in the rain, thunderstorm*, angry man* (P, cc) 4. wilted plant*, hot tired runner*, glass of water (CC, p) 5. spinning top*, girl playing, dancing ballerina* (CF) 6. ancient tree*, rocking chair, a grandfather* (CC, p) 7. broken down house*, moldy swiss cheese*, rat 8. rifle, marching men*, flock of birds* (CF) 9. house with shades pulled down*, bed, woman with closed eyes*

(p, cf) 10. worn-out woman*, grazing goat, barren landscape* (p) 11. snorting bull*, boxer*, leather gloves (CC, p) 12. ocean, plane on fire*, fish on hook* (CC) 13. old man*, candle nearly burned down*, smoking pipe (CC) 14. woman with jewels*, city street, city lit up at night* (CF, cc) 15. rose bud*, baby*, watering can (CC)

SET II 16. drowsy person*, "droopy" house*, living room (cf) 17. foggy street corner*, veiled woman *, moving car (p) 18. weeping willow*, park bench, sad woman* (p) 19. car, car wheel*, traffic circle* (CF) 20. rooster crowing*, barnyard, farmer showing muscles* (CC) 21. girl, melting snowman *, waves running into sandcastle* (CC) 22. wilted flowers*, old woman sick in bed*, vase on table (CC) 23. compass showing directions, thirsty man finds oasis in desert*, ship

in storm guided by lighthouse beam* (CC) 24. watering can, woman with long hair*, hanging plant* (CF) 25. cracks in ice near skating boy*, boy with beehive overhead*,

fishing rod (CC) 26. fly in spider's web*, fishing boat, fish caught in net* (CC, cf) 27. ambulance, explosion*, man in a rage* (P) 28. sunflower*, greenhouse, tall thin woman* (CF) 29. blind man at the top of stairs*, German shepherd dog, ship navi-

gating through rocks at night* (CC)

There are numerous sources of variation in the items. For some, the metaphoric connection is strictly conceptual in the sense that there is no physical resemblance between the members of the critical pair. Thus, in the

13



MONOGRAPHS

impending death metaphor represented in item 13, there is no actual physical similarity between an old man and a candle on the verge of extinction. For other items, however, the basis of the metaphoric link is configurational. The snake and winding river of item 2 is a particularly good example of the latter type of metaphor. Another way of viewing these two types of items is along a dimension of figurativity versus operativity (see Piaget 1970). In the present context, this distinction refers to the extent of transformation that must be performed upon the stimuli in order to apprehend the metaphoric connection. Items that are more figurative in character offer similarities that are intrinsic within the surface properties of the pictures themselves. Little transformational activity is required beyond recognition of a perceptual similarity. On the other hand, the more conceptual items require that the subject transform the critical pictures into their symbolic referents in order to appreciate the similarity between them. Of course, none of the items are completely operative (given the perceptual medium employed) nor completely figurative (given the requirement of apprehending a non- obvious similarity). We are clearly dealing with variations in degree of figurativity versus operativity.

Inspection of the MTT items in their pictorial form (see Appendix) reveals an additional component that is present in some items but lacking in others. This component is the physiognomic-affective; the metaphorical connection has an emotionally expressive character. Item 3 (the angry man and the thunderstorm) is a good example of the foregoing type.

Given the post hoc character of these item classifications, independent judges were recruited for the purpose of categorizing the items as conceptual, configural, or physiognomic-affective. Four adult judges with no prior connection to the research were given the critical metaphoric pair from each of the 29 MTT triads and were asked to use the three-category scheme for classifying the items. They were informed that the categories were not mutually exclusive, and hence they could check anywhere from one to three categories for each pair. The judges were provided with the original MTT plates and made their decisions privately and individually.

For 23 of the 29 MTT pairs (79%), all four judges agreed in their assignment of an item to a category. These consensual classifications are designated as conceptual (CC), configurational (CF), or physiognomic (P) following each item in the listing above (p. 13). Judges frequently assigned items to more than one category, however, and here there was less uniformity. Where three of the four judges agreed on a classification, lower- case designations have been used: conceptual (cc), configurational (cf), and physiognomic (p). It can be seen that some items generated only a single dominant classification. Other items, in contrast, yielded both a primary and secondary classification. A variety of other patterns were also present, including one item (no. 7) for which there was no majority agreement by

14



KOGAN ET AL.

the judges. For 28 of the 29 items, at least three of four judges agreed on a

primary and/or secondary classification. On the whole, it would appear reasonable to assert that agreement far exceeds disagreement in the specification of the intrinsic properties of the metaphoric pair in each MTT item. The evidence for interjudge agreement should clearly help to facilitate the interpretation of differential item difficulty both within and across the age groups under study.

Though little consideration will be given to the matter here, there is a further distinction among the items that is worthy of note. Metaphors as figures of speech are generally asymmetrical in the sense that one of the elements--designated the "topic"-is described in terms of the other ele-

ment--designated the "vehicle." The common property underlying the comparison is usually called the "ground." For many of the metaphors listed above, it is possible to envision a verbal translation in which one of the stimuli would function as topic and the other as vehicle. Other items, in contrast, do not seem to lend themselves to this type of translation; they appear to be symmetrical in the sense that either member of the pair could function as topic or vehicle without any apparent changes in meaning. The interpretation of symmetry-asymmetry has become one of the major issues in the current wave of research on metaphor (e.g., Ortony 1979a; Verbrugge 1980). The issue is beyond the scope of this Monograph, but the interested reader might wish to consult Connor and Kogan (1980) for an empirical examination of symmetry-asymmetry in MTT items.

Task Administration

Individual administration of the MTT by a female examiner has characterized all of the research using children as subjects. Children were

uniformly told that they were participating in a research project concerned with the way people think about pictures. In the majority of these studies, the three pictures comprising a triad were placed before the child in a horizontal position. Order of presentation of the triads was held constant for all subjects participating in a particular study, but the placement of pictures within triads was randomized across subjects. For each triad, children were first asked to indicate their most preferred pairing (which two pictures "go together best") and the basis on which the pairing was made. The children were then asked whether they could make ainy other pairings and, if so, were again requested to specify the basis for it (them). A child who gave a second pairing was always asked if he or she wished to form an additional pair. Naturally, no further request for pairing was made of children who generated the three possible pairs. It should be noted that no pressure whatever was applied to children to elicit pairings beyond the first one. Every effort was made to maintain a nonevaluative atmosphere for task adminis-

15



MONOGRAPHS

tration. The colorful and novel quality of the stimulus materials contributed to such an atmosphere.

Though initial pilot work with adults also employed individual administration, it quickly became apparent that large-scale data collection with the MTT could be facilitated with a group-administered procedure for adolescents and adults. Slides of the stimuli were prepared, and these were

projected on a screen to groups of subjects in a classroom context. Of course, randomization of picture order within triads was no longer feasible under these conditions. The listing of the 29 triads (Sets I and II) above reflects the left-to-right order of each picture on the screen. A response form was prepared that enabled subjects to list most preferred as well as other pairings and to state the basis for each pairing. Each triad was exposed for 90 seconds, a time period that proved ample for complete responding in preliminary testing. Instructions were given orally prior to exposure of the first slide, and an initial practice item was used to make certain that all subjects understood the requirements of the task.

In the course of administering the MTT to children of early elementary school age, we observed that some of these children used the horizontal

arrangement of the triad as an opportunity for thematic responding. The three pictures would be connected by means of a story line. This kind of

complementarity necessarily precludes the possibility of recognizing metaphoric similarities. In an effort to inhibit thematic responding, a modification in the presentation of the triad (as shown in fig. 1) was carried out. The upper part of that figure indicates the three possible locations of the metaphoric pair in the standard horizontal presentation. The lower part of the figure shows the two possible locations of the metaphoric pair in the modified

0 -- -I- W E1E00 F~~m7 EIWEI

E IILJ

F1D CE] OI I1

FIGURE 1.-Alternate arrangements of metaphoric pair (M) in triad in standard format (upper portion) and modified format (lower portion).

16



KOGAN ET AL.

arrangement. The examiner pointed to the bottom picture and asked the child to pick one of the top two pictures which would make a good pair with the bottom one (because they are "alike" or "go together"). This procedure forced the child to consider but two pictures at a time. The term "alike" was added to the instructions as a further encouragement to pair on the basis of similarity (see Stanes 1973). The child was also asked if the other picture on top could also make a pair with the bottom one. In this way, the child was always forced to consider the possibility of pairing the two critical pictures. This modified procedure, of course, has the disadvantage of elimi- nating from consideration one of the nonmetaphorical pairings. This would appear to be of minor consequence, however, for such pairings do not enter into the scoring system for metaphoric comprehension. Of course, the procedural modification complicates the problem of age comparisons. The initial purpose of the modified procedure, however, was to find out whether any metaphoric understanding was present in younger children. Hence, in the present context, the elimination of interfering task factors assumed priority over the issue of explicit age comparisons.

Scoring and Interjudge Reliability A three-point scale was employed for scoring the extent of understanding

of the metaphorical similarity within each triad. A score of 2 was given for recognition and satisfactory explanation of the metaphorical linkage; a score of 1 was assigned for recognition accompanied by less than a completely satisfactory explanation; a score of 0 implied that the subject failed to join the critical pair or paired them on a nonmetaphorical basis. A total score for metaphoric understanding was obtained by summing across items (triads). The maximum possible score naturally varied with the form of the MTT administered. Total scores could be expressed on a mean per-item basis, however, to permit between-sample comparisons.

As a check on reliability of scoring, two interjudge agreement analyses were carried out. The first of these was based on 30 protocols representing approximately one-fourth of samples of fourth- and seventh-grade males and females who had taken Set I of the MTT. These 30 protocols (containing 450 items) were scored by two judges working independently. Percentage agreement was 94.0%. The second analysis was based on 15 protocols, approximately one-fourth of a sample of fifth-grade males and females who had taken both Set I and Set II of the MTT. These protocols (representing 435 items) yielded an interjudge percentage agreement of 96.6%. It should be noted that almost all discrepancies between judges equaled 1 point in magnitude. In other words, judges occasionally disagreed over total versus partial credit or partial versus no credit; they virtually never disagreed to the extent of attributing total versus no credit to an item.

In a few cases, we observed that metaphor was used to link a noncritical

17



MONOGRAPHS

picture pair in a particular triad. Such "importations" were treated as additional metaphors and scored separately. Some of these were included within the protocols given to independent judges for reliability purposes. Percentage agreement in scoring these additional metaphors exceeded 90% in both of the samples described above.

18



III. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND INTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE METAPHORIC

TRIADS TASK

SUBJECTS

The MTT has been administered to several samples of male and female subjects whose approximate mean ages ranged from 7/2 to 28. Table 1 pro- vides the basic descriptive statistics for performance on the MTT for the various samples employed. Sample letter designations indicate schools, colleges, and universities. In the case of schools A, B, and C, the number sub- scripts represent different grades within each school. Note that all of the children who served as subjects (samples A, B, C, D, and E) were drawn from private schools in Manhattan and hence were predominantly Cau- casian and middle to upper-middle class. Schools A, D, and E are coeduca- tional; schools B and C are all-boys and all-girls schools, respectively. Sample F consisted of freshmen undergraduates enrolled in a school of design and applied arts in Manhattan. Sample G was composed of psychology majors at one of the college campuses of the State University of New York. Finally, social science graduate students at a Manhattan university comprised sample H.

The various samples participated at different phases of the overall research program. Initial studies exploring the properties and correlates of the MTT were carried out on children enrolled in schools B and C, and graduate students from university H. The latter sample was used to provide a baseline of adult metaphoric competence. Consistency of MTT performance across Sets I and II was examined in samples A3 and E. Cognitive and behavioral correlates of MTT performance were explored in those samples as well as in sample G. Training studies aimed at experimental enhancement of MTT performance were carried out in samples A1, A2, and D. Samples F and G were used to try out the group-administered version of the MTT.

19



MONOGRAPHS

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KOGAN ET AL.

RELIABILITY

Coefficient a (Cronbach 1951) was used to assess the internal consistency of the MTT. This statistic was not computed for the three samples that participated in the training studies, given the counterbalancing of items required for experimental purposes. With the exception of the boys in sample B1, where a fell to .42, the coefficients for Set I of the MTT ranged from the mid-.70s to the mid-.80s. The internal consistency of the Set II items appears to be of the same order of magnitude as observed in the case of Set I. On the whole, it would appear safe to assert that the MTT is sufficiently reliable to warrant validational research. This conclusion is reinforced by the evidence of very substantial and significant r's in school E between Set I and Set II MTT scores (.70 and .80, p < .001, for males and females, respectively) when the two sets were administered without a time interval between them. Group administration of the 29 MTT items in sample F also yielded high levels of consistency in performance across Set I and Set II subtotals (r's = .73 and .55, p < .001, for males and females, respectively). With a 6-month interval separating the administration of Sets I and II in sample A3, the correlations, though dropping in magnitude, remained statistically significant (r = .40, p < .05, in males; r = .62, p < .01,in females). Note finally in the last column of table 1 how each of these between-set correlations increases when the Horst (1951) modification of the Spearman-Brown correction for attenuation is applied. The Horst formula corrects for the slight imbalance in the number of items in Sets I and II.

In sum, it is apparent that, on the whole, Sets I and II of the MTT attained quite respectable levels of internal-consistency reliability. The correlations between the two sets justify their combination into a single instrument with a highly satisfactory level of reliability. At the same time, it must be noted that consistency over a 6-month period was modest. Further longitudinal research with the MTT is clearly required to establish the long-term stability of the instrument.

AGE AND SEX DIFFERENCES

No consistent sex differences in MTT performance have been observed. Examination of the means in table 1 suggests a slight superiority for females, but it must be stressed that none of the mean differences achieved statistical significance.

Age differences, in contrast, were substantial. Mean levels in table 1 show a progressive increase in MTT performance with age for samples exposed to the task in its standard form (the triad arranged horizontally). When the modified form of the MTT was used (see fig. 1) in samples A1 and D, it can be seen that an enhanced level of performance was observed for those subjects relative to the samples receiving the standard form. Note

21



MONOGRAPHS

that the 7?-year-olds in sample A, generated mean performance levels comparable to those of 9-10-year olds in samples B1, C1, and E. When 9/2- year-olds were given the modified form of the MTT (sample D), their mean performance exceeded that of their age peers in other samples (A3, B1, C1, E), although the difference for females in samples D and C1 was slight. Note that the males in sample D performed as well as a sample 3 years older (B2) that was given the standard form of the MTT.

The results obtained with the modified form of the MTT clearly indicate that the modified spatial arrangement of the triad with its accompany- ing elimination of one of the possible nonmetaphoric pairings can produce levels of performance in 7-10-year-olds that approximate those of children 1-3 years older who have been given the standard form of the MTT. There can be no question that the modified MTT reduces the attentional burden on children and, in addition, forces the child to consider the metaphoric pairing. Where younger children are concerned, the disposition toward thematic responding was very much reduced by the modified spatial arrangement. It is clearly the method of choice for these children. If the MTT were given to all samples in the modified form, there is little reason to expect that the developmental trends would change, and we might find that the modified form could be given to subjects younger in age-kindergarten and first- grade children-than those employed in our research thus far.' Unfortu- nately, we have not tried the MTT with lower-SES children, and hence it is quite possible that the younger age boundaries cited above are somewhat optimistic.

It is noteworthy that social science graduate students (sample H) did not reach a ceiling on the MTT. Evidently, the task in its standard form can be reliably used with samples of middle-elementary school-age children through adulthood. If the modified form were given to late adolescents and adults, we would expect it to produce proportionally smaller increments in performance in comparison to younger subjects. Older individuals are less likely to be susceptible to stimulus display factors, implying an age-by-form interaction. Whether the observed increments would be large enough to yield ceiling effects (and reduced interindividual variation as a consequence) is a matter for empirical examination. If these increments should prove to be of negligible magnitude in older adolescents and adults, more general use of the modified form of the MTT could be recommended. Given the greater accessibility of the latter to children at younger age levels, a broader age span could be studied with a common instrument.

Also worth noting is the rather marked discrepancy between the two samples that responded to the MTT in its group-administered form. The

7 In a sample of 21 kindergarten children (6 males and 15 females) with a median age of 5-10, the mean MTT per-item score was 0.37 (average SD = 0.63). This mean is close to that of 8 2-year-olds on the standard MTT.

22



KOGAN ET AL.

design students of sample F clearly outperformed the state college psychology undergraduates of sample G. Indeed, the performance of the latter group was no better than that of 12-13-year-olds in samples B2 and C2. It is apparent that wide variations in adult metaphoric competence can be expected with the present instrument. Between-sample differences in the young adults, however, are unlikely to reflect ontogenetic changes. Rather, it is much more likely that these reflect population differences. Although such effects may be operative in the younger samples as well, the use of younger and older children from the same school makes a developmental interpretation of age differences appear more reasonable.

ITEM LEVEL DIFFERENCES

As might be expected, developmental changes for items corresponded to those observed for overall means. Tables 2 and 3 present Set I item data for males and females, respectively. Item data for Set II are shown in table 4 for males and in table 5 for females. Apart from the obvious improvement of performance with age, the most salient characteristic of the four tables cited is the wide variation in item-difficulty levels in the case of all of the samples tested. These ranged from zero successes on a specific item for the younger subjects to complete success on another item for female graduate students. Do these relative difficulty levels remain constant across age? Shifts in the relative ordering of mean difficulty levels were limited in scope. Kendall's coefficient of concordance applied to ranked item-difficulty levels for Set I of the MTT yielded highly significant W's for eight male and eight female samples (W's of .72 and .75, p < .001, respectively). For the Set II items (tables 4 and 5), the concordance in item-difficulty levels was again statistically significant across the three male and three female samples (W's of .82 and .75, p < .01, respectively).

A further question of interest concerns the kind of item content that contributes to the relative ease or difficulty of understanding the metaphoric linkage. If we consider the five most difficult items within Set I for males and females, the four common to both sexes were 9 (house with shades pulled down, woman with closed eyes), 10 (worn-out woman, barren landscape), 2 (winding river, snake), and 14 (woman with jewels, city lit up at night). The four easiest items common to both sexes were 5 (spinning top, dancing ballerina), 11 (snorting bull, boxer), 6 (ancient tree, a grandfather), and 1 (violin, singing canary).

Can one detect any common theme within each of the foregoing clusters? For this purpose, we make use of the item classification generated by our independent judges (pp. 14-15). Where the difficult items are concerned, two (items 2 and 14) require sensitivity to configurational cues, and two (items 9 and 10) are to a large extent physiognomic in character. In the

23



MONOGRAPHS

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24



KOGAN ET AL.

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25



MONOGRAPHS

case of the latter two items, the subject was required to appreciate the similarity between facial features and subtle physiognomic equivalents in the man- made and natural world, respectively. In the case of the snake-river (item 2) and woman-cityscape (item 14) comparisons, the subtle configural similarity would be noticed only if obvious complementary pairings were suppressed (e.g., the woman lives in the city, the snake is found next to the river). Configural similarity as such cannot be held responsible for the difficulty, for the easiest Set I item (5) offered highly salient visual cues of motion for

TABLE 4

ITEM MEANS RANKED FOR SET II TRIADS (MALES)

SAMPLES

A3 E F RANK

ITEM X Rank Rank Rank SUM

16................. .08 3 .33 6 .89 6 15 17 ................. .20 6 .21 3 .94 7 16 18 ................. .24 7 .63 9 1.83 14 30 19 ................. .32 8.5 .50 8 1.53 11 27.5 20 ................. .04 1 .29 4.5 .86 5 10.5 21 ................. .80 14 1.38 14 1.61 12.5 40.5 22................. .32 8.5 .29 4.5 .64 2 15 23................. .08 3 .04 1 .33 1 5 24................. .56 12 .83 12 1.47 9.5 33.5 25................. .08 3 .17 2 .75 4 9 26................. .60 13 .67 10.5 1.44 8 31.5 27................. .44 10 1.00 13 1.47 9.5 32.5 28 ................. .52 11 .67 10.5 1.61 12.5 34 29 ................. .12 5 .46 7 .67 3 15

TABLE 5

ITEM MEANS RANKED FOR SET II TRIADS (FEMALES)

SAMPLES

A3 E F RANK

ITEM x Rank x Rank x Rank SUM

16................. .20 4 .15 5 .86 4 13 17................. .15 1 .35 8 .74 3 12 18 ................. .70 11 .88 10 1.78 14 35 19................. .20 4 .08 2.5 1.58 12.5 19 20................. .20 4 .08 2.5 1.29 7 13.5 21................. 1.10 14 1.15 12 1.53 10 36 22................. .30 8 .31 7 .88 6 21 23................. .20 4 .12 4 .29 1 9 24................. .50 10 1.31 14 1.49 8 32 25 ................. .20 4 .00 1 .61 2 7 26 ................. .75 12 1.19 13 1.57 11 36 27 ................. .40 9 .96 11 1.51 9 29 28................. .90 13 .65 9 1.58 12.5 34.5 29 ................ .25 7 .23 6 .87 5 18

26



KOGAN ET AL.

the dancing ballerina and spinning top. Note that the judges consensually agreed on the configural character of that item. The three items that followed in ease of metaphoric understanding were, according to our judges, conceptual in nature. The metaphoric "ground" for each is relatively straightforward: power and/or aggressiveness (item 11), old age (item 6), and music generating (item 1).

The clustering of difficult and easy items in Set II partially reinforced the differences observed in Set I. The two most difficult items for males and females were 23 (thirsty man finds oasis in desert, ship in storm guided by lighthouse beam) and 25 (cracks in ice near skating boy, boy with beehive overhead). Both items were judged to be conceptual in nature, but both also depend upon recognition of perceptual details (a lighthouse beam, cracks in the ice, bees emerging from a beehive). Unless these details were registered (and our data indicate they often were not), there was no possibility that the conceptual linkage could be appreciated.

The easier items in Set II offer a combination of the configurational and the conceptual. One of the relatively easy items was judged to be conceptual-item 21 (melting snowman, waves running into sandcastle). A second easy item-27 (explosion, man in a rage)-was placed in the physiognomic category by our judges. Recall that two of the more difficult items in Set I were judged to be physiognomic in character. Two other fairly easy items were judged to be configurational-24 (woman with long hair, hanging plant), and 28 (sunflower, tall thin woman). Both of these offer a salient configural similarity without any obvious competing conceptual alternative. In sum, it is evident that the configurational-conceptual-physiognomic distinction as such was not related to ease or difficulty of metaphoric comprehension. Rather, it appears to be the relative sophistication or subtlety of the similarity (whether conceptual, configurational, or physiognomic) that accounts for the level of item difficulty.

Given the high level of consistency of item difficulty across age groups (as reflected in the highly significant W values), the data offer no evidence for any obvious unilinear developmental shift from figurative to operative modes of cognitive processing. Rather, the outcomes appear to be more congruent with a multilinear notion in which both figurative and operative modes progress from more simple to more sophisticated levels of functioning (see Werner 1957). Gardner (1977), on the other hand, has raised the possibility that the figurative mode levels off with age, or at least does not show the dramatic developmental changes that characterize the operative mode. Some support for this hypothesis is apparent in tables 2 and 3. If one exam- ines the difficult items assigned configural properties by the judges (items 2, 9, and 14), it can be seen that the rate of improvement over the age span studied is quite modest in comparison to the conceptual items that the younger children found to be difficult. The observed trends become even

27



MONOGRAPHS

more marked if the visual arts students (sample F) are not considered in the

comparison. As Gardner (1977) notes, figurative capacities continue to flower in artists, hence calling into question any notion of a universal bio- logically based decline. On the whole, however, the present findings clearly support the general idea of more rapid operative than figurative growth from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood.

ITEM-SUM CORRELATION

Equal in importance to differences in absolute and relative item- difficulty levels is the degree to which the various items reflect the construct under assessment. An answer to the latter question is provided by the item- sum correlations listed in tables 6, 7, 8, and 9 for all of those samples in which the focus of interest is on determinants of individual variation in performance. Tables 6 and 7 present the correlations for Set I items in males and females, respectively. Set II item-sum correlations are shown for males and females in tables 8 and 9, respectively. Note that there are two entries for each item in the case of three of the samples. Subjects in these samples responded to all 29 triads, thus making it possible to correlate performance on each item with its respective metaphor subtotal (Set I or II) and with the grand total (Sets I + II).

Summary statistics for the four tables are shown in the two right-hand columns and the bottom row. The former indicates for each item (triad) the proportion of samples in which the item-sum correlation was statistically significant. The latter (bottom row) specifies the proportion of significant item-sum correlations within each sample. A number of observations can be drawn from examination of the four tables at issue. Where individual items are concerned, it can be seen that each item generated a significant correlation with total scores in at least one of the samples, and the vast majority of items yielded significant item-sum correlations in half or more of the samples under study. From the perspective of the samples, in almost every case a majority of the items produced significant item-sum correlations. Indeed, in a few of the samples almost all of the items were significantly correlated with the subtotal (Set I or II) and/or the grand total (Sets I + II).

Are there any consistent developmental trends in respect to the item- sum correlations? Clearly evident is the indication that item 9 (where the critical pair consists of a house with drawn shades and a woman's face with closed eyes) has little to do with the construct under study where preadolescent samples are concerned. The difficulty of that item for those younger age groups (see tables 2 and 3) strongly suggests that the item only be used with samples at the stage of adolescence or older (where significant item-sum correlations were obtained). Item 10 (the worn-out woman and barren landscape constituting the critical pair) was also quite difficult for

28



KOGAN ET AL.

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preadolescents (see tables 2 and 3), and here again one might question the appropriateness of the item for preadolescents on the basis of the pattern of item-sum correlations across age. The case for the removal of this item is equivocal, however, given the marked sex difference at the younger ages. In sum, only one of the 29 triads in the MTT is a clear candidate for exclu- sion (though only in preadolescent samples). Such findings regarding the coherent internal structure of the instrument offer considerable encouragement in respect to subsequent construct validational efforts (to be presented later).

INTERNAL CORRELATES OF THE MTT TOTAL SCORE

Performance on the MTT can be characterized along a number of dimensions in addition to total score. In the present section, we shall examine the correlations between overall MTT performance and these additional MTT task characteristics. These are listed in table 10.

Pairings Attempted The first column of table 10 presents the correlations between MTT

totals and the number of pairings attempted. It can be seen that the r's were uniformly positive, and the majority were statistically significant. The median r across the samples was .48. It will be recalled that the task instructions did not require subjects to attempt the three possible pairings present within each item. The correlational outcomes clearly indicate, however,

TABLE 10 PRODUCT-MOMENT CORRELATIONS OF MTT TOTAL SCORE

WITH OTHER MTT INDICES

N Total Metaphor Extra Sample Attempted Time First Metaphors

A3 males (Set I) ....... . 60** .49* .73** .41" A3 males (Set II)....... .11 .00 .81** .21 A3 females (Set I)...... .60** .63** .45* .18 A3 females (Set II)..... .29 .53* .90** .17 B1 males ............. .32 ... .70** B2 males............. .44* .61** .58** .17 C1 females............. .44* .37* .60** C2 females............ .55** .39* .73** .56** E males. ............. .57** .47* .73** .51** E females .............42* .46* .65** .14 Gmales ............... .43** ... .77** G females .............18 ... .82** H males ............. .75** ... .58** .05 H females ............ .66** ... 73** .15

"*P <.05. "** p < .01.

33



MONOGRAPHS

that those individuals who spontaneously formed more pairings had a greater likelihood of detecting the metaphoric similarities within the triads. 8

Total Time For several of the samples under study, it was possible to obtain a

measure of the total amount of time that the subject devoted to the MTT. With one exception (see table 10), r's between the latter and total MTT score were significantly positive (median r = .47). This outcome is hardly surprising, given the previously discussed relationship between MTT total score and number of pairings attempted. As the latter increases in frequency, it is highly likely that the amount of time devoted to the task will correspond- ingly rise. For the nine samples where the relevant data were available, the r's between pairings attempted and total time were uniformly significant (one-tailed) and ranged between .30 and .68, with a median r of .51.

Pairing Sequence Consider next the sequence of pairing. Subjects may choose the critical

metaphoric pair as their first and most preferred similarity. Alternatively, they may place that particular pair in second or third position. Note in table 10 that the choice of the metaphoric pair as most preferred (first in sequence) was consistently related to the MTT total score. The correlations were uniformly significant, though they varied in magnitude. Across the various samples, the primary choice accounted for approximately 20%- 80% of the total MTT score variance. These results clearly indicate that metaphorically competent subjects consider the metaphoric pairs to be the best offered within the MTT. Understanding and preference are firmly linked in the present domain. Nevertheless, in the context of the considerable variation in correlational magnitudes evident in table 10, it would seem inappropriate to score only the initial, most preferred pairing across the MTT triads. Given the focus on metaphoric capacity in the present research, it is difficult to justify the sacrifice of such variance in the interest of the more rapid and efficient task administration that a single pairing would allow.

Extra Metaphors Consider, finally, the relationship between MTT total score and number

of additional metaphors (i.e., forming alternative pairings on a metaphoric basis). It can be seen that the correlations were significant in less than half of the samples in which additional metaphors were scored. The pattern of correlations is sufficiently erratic to suggest that a capacity for metaphoric

8 One of the training studies discussed later demonstrated that an experimental requirement of exhaustive pairing for each triad produced a significant increment in the total MTT score. This permits one to draw the tentative causal inference that a reluctance to search for all possible pairings may be partially responsible for poorer performance.

34



KOGAN ET AL.

comprehension does not necessarily imply a disposition to produce unique metaphorical pairings.9 Before accepting this conclusion, we examined the correlations between specific MTT items and the additional metaphor score. We reasoned that the generation of additional metaphors might prove related to success on the more difficult items on the ground that the latter offer the least salient metaphoric cues. Those subjects who are sensitive to such cues might conceivably be so metaphorically inclined as to produce it under conditions where the cues are minimal (the nonmetaphoric pairs). This hypothesis, however, was not confirmed. In almost all samples, the additional metaphor score was just as likely to correlate significantly with

relatively easy as with relatively difficult MTT items. On the whole, then, our results are reasonably congruent with the view that metaphoric comprehension and production are not closely tied (see Gardner et al. 1978).

9 Since the triads were deliberately constructed so that the nonmetaphorical pairings were categorical, functional, or analytic, the fact that a subject would override these salient bases for pairing in favor of a metaphoric alternative suggests that the skill at issue is less one of comprehension than of production.

35



IV. EXTERNAL CORRELATES OF PERFORMANCE ON THE METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK

INTELLECTIVE APTITUDES AND ACHIEVEMENTS

For the school-age samples, scores on standardized tests of intellective

aptitude and achievement were generally available in school records. The identical tests, however, were not always used by different schools, and hence only gross comparisons across samples were possible. For samples B1, B2, C1, and C2, the battery median from the Iowa Achievement Tests and the Otis- Lennon IQ index were available. Sample A3 subjects had taken the Metro- politan Achievement Test battery and their scores were provided to us. In addition, we administered the Achenbach (1969) analogies items. Half of these items are of the standard type, but the other half are deceptive in the sense of offering a high-probability word association that is incorrect. The two kinds of items are designated as nonfoil and foil, respectively. In the case of sample E subjects, scores on the Stanford Achievement Tests (intermediate) were available in the records. Finally, the WAIS similarities subtest was administered to the college students of sample G.

The pattern of outcomes across samples was one of gross inconsistency. Sex differences in the magnitude of the correlation between metaphoric comprehension and the various intellective indices were highly salient, but these differences in turn did not assume the same direction across samples.

For samples B1, B2, and C1, correlation coefficients between MTT performance and intellective indices were nonsignificant, ranging from -.20 to .27. For the females of sample C2, on the other hand, the correlations were significant at the .01 level for both the battery median (r = .45) and the IQ index (r = .50). In the case of sample E males, the word meaning, paragraph meaning, and language subtests of the Stanford Achievement Tests were significantly related to MTT scores (r's of .49, .54, and .49, respectively). However, the three corresponding r's for sample E females were uniformly nonsignificant (.35, .26, and .30, respectively). The direction of the sex difference was reversed in sample A3, where males (the 18 Ss

36



KOGAN ET AL.

for whom scores were available) yielded nonsignificant r's between the reading achievement and word knowledge subtests of the Metropolitan Achievement battery, on the one hand, and MTT performance, on the other (r's of .43 and .30, respectively). The corresponding r's for females were significant beyond the .01 level (.70 and .68, respectively). For the young adults of sample G, the WAIS similarities subtest was selected, since it appeared to tap that aspect of intellective functioning likely to be most closely related to the ability to detect metaphoric similarities. Once again, however, results failed to generalize across sex, as significance was obtained for males (r = .30, p < .05) but not for females (r = .01).

Reasonable consistency across the male and female samples was observed only in the case of foil analogies in sample A3 (r's of .45 and .53 with MTT scores, p < .05, for males and females, respectively). These were the more difficult analogies in the sense that the child had to suppress a strong, but incorrect, associative response. For the less difficult nonfoil analogies, nonsignificant r's with MTT performance of .21 and .41 were obtained for males and females, respectively. There is reason to believe then that analogical reasoning enters into metaphoric thinking, but the correlations were not so high (relative to the reliability of the measures) as to suggest that the two constructs reflect identical cognitive processes. From the pattern of findings outlined in the present section, it is apparent that we still have much to learn about the relationship of intelligence to the type of metaphoric skill under consideration here.

OTHER COGNITIVE CORRELATES

Divergent Thinking Tasks and scoring procedures.-The children's version of the Remote

Associates Test (RAT) (Mednick & Mednick 1962) was administered to one of the child samples (A3). Though not structurally a divergent-thinking (DT) task (each item has one correct answer), the RAT has been shown to have strong conceptual and empirical links to the DT domain (see Wallach 1970). The RAT and DT tasks appear to call upon similar associative-thinking processes.

Two of the Wallach-Kogan (1965) tasks-alternate uses (AU) and pattern meanings (PM)-were given to the above sample (A3) and to one of the young adult samples (G). These were scored for fluency (total N responses) and for idea quality. For the latter, each DT response was rated on a seven-point scale. Instructions in the use of the scale specified that a rating of 3 should be assigned to common popular responses, ratings of 1 and 2 to bizarre and marginally appropriate responses, respectively, and ratings of 4-7 for appropriate responses ranging from the slightly better than common to the highly original and (for alternate uses) practically useful.

37



MONOGRAPHS

The rating scheme is described in detail in Caudle (1975). The mean rating of responses to each specific item was obtained for each subject, and these mean ratings were then summed across the four items within each task. Two

independent judges were employed for each sample, and interjudge reliabilities ranged from .86 to .90. Discrepancies between judges were averaged to yield a final set of quality scores.

Results.--Correlations between the DT measures and MTT performance are presented in table 11 for both children (A3) and adults (G). In the case of the RAT, r's fell short of statistical significance for male children, but a

marginally significant relation between RAT scores and Set I of the MTT was found for A3 females. In respect to the Wallach-Kogan DT tasks, results were not completely consistent across sex and age. For males in both the child and adult samples, fluency indices were not related to metaphoric comprehension. Quality indices, on the other hand, were significantly related to MTT performance (for both AU and PM in children, but only for PM in adults). In the case of females, both fluency and quality scores were

positively associated with metaphoric competence. Across age and sex

groups (for total MTT score), all quality indices proved to be significantly related to metaphoric performance with the single exception of the adult males for alternate uses quality. Possibly, the greater consistency in relation-

ships for PM relative to AU quality derives from the fact that both PM and MTT are comprised of figural stimuli. On the whole, the findings tend to

support the view that the quality of DT responses (more than sheer quantity) reflects processes akin to metaphoric competence. An even stronger inference

along these lines can be drawn when divergent thinking is assessed with a figural task.

In a related investigation based on children ranging from 5 to 12 years of age, Malgady (1977) examined the link between interpretation of figures of speech (e.g., "The thunder is like bowling") taken from Koch (1970) and the uses subtest of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. For the entire sample, the fluency rather than the originality score from the uses subtest was significantly related to figure-of-speech interpretation. These findings are not in correspondence with ours, but it must be noted that Malgady used strictly verbal tasks. Further, it is difficult to interpret a correlation between two variables across an age range of 5-12 when age has not been statistically controlled. Nevertheless, the Malgady research is of interest in pointing to the recognition that sensitivity to metaphor may have something in common with the domain of divergent thinking.

Breadth of Categorization Task.-The young adults of sample G completed the Pettigrew (1958)

category-width task. Each item of that task offers a central-tendency value for a category (e.g., the average width of a window), and the subject must

38



KOGAN ET AL.

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39



MONOGRAPHS

choose (from multiple-choice alternatives) the value of the upper and lower boundary of the category (e.g., the width of the smallest and largest window). The breadth versus narrowness of a subject's categories reflects the distance of his or her choices from central-tendency values. As conceptualized by Pettigrew, broad categorizors prefer to risk errors of overinclusion in classifying stimuli, whereas narrow categorizors prefer to risk errors of overexclu- sion. We expected that subjects manifesting greater breadth would perform better on the MTT, for the pairings of stimuli on a cross-category basis clearly involves the potential risk of errors of overinclusion.

Results.-As table 11 indicates, the foregoing hypothesis was confirmed in sample G (r's were significant at the .01 level for both males and females).

Physiognomic Sensitivity Task and scoring procedure.-A sorting task was constructed that permitted

subjects to form concepts using expressive and affective or more conventional and literal dimensions. There were 25 stimuli divided into five categories, each of which had five exemplars: adjectives of emotion, nouns with affective connotations, stick figures expressing emotional states, line patterns, and color patches (see fig. 2). Subjects were instructed to form five separate groupings of any size desired and to state the basis for each grouping. An identical number of groupings was required of each subject so as to eliminate individual variation in this dimension (labeled conceptual differentiation by Gardner & Schoen [1962]).

Each cross-category grouping (with appropriate explanation) was credited and weighted according to the number of categories crossed. Thus grouping items across two distinct categories received a weight of 1; if three or more categories were included in the grouping, a weight of 2 would be assigned. These weights were summed across the total physiognomic sensitivity score.

Results.-The foregoing score was substantially and significantly correlated with MTT performance in both males and females (r's of .56 and .57, p < .001, respectively). These results strongly confirmed our earlier theoretical speculations regarding the similar cognitive processes intrinsic to both physiognomic and metaphoric sensitivity.

Verbal Metaphor In the present section, we approach the issue of convergent validity

most directly. Is the comprehension of visual metaphor related to or essentially independent of comprehension of metaphor in verbal form? In connection with research directed to the asymmetry issue (Connor & Kogan 1980), a set of verbal triads was prepared. Some of these represented verbal adaptions of the pictorial MTT triads; some of the others were based on verbal metaphors and similes used by other researchers (Billow 1975; Ver-

40



KOGAN ET AL.

brugge 1974; Winner, Rosenstiel, & Gardner 1976). Twenty triads were devised, and these are listed verbatim below. For each, the first two terms

represent the metaphoric linkage.

1. an unfriendly guard, a boulder, a prison work detail 2. a flock of geese, marching soldiers, a rifle 3. a strand of beads, a freight train, a robbery 4. a deep snowfall, a thick blanket, a cold night 5. a man pushing through a crowd, a bulldozer, a ground-breaking cere-

mony 6. an avalanche, heavy suitcases on a baggage chute, a ski trip 7. a ship in stormy seas, a man lost in the desert, a compass 8. teeth, pearls, throat 9. a giraffe, the Empire State Building, Central Park Zoo

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FIGURE 2.-Physiognomic sorting task (colors represented in cells 2, 5, 13, 19, and 23 were red, gray, pink, green, and yellow, respectively).

41



MONOGRAPHS

10. a blind man walking alone, a boat at sea on a foggy night, a bridge 11. a boxer, a charging bull, leather gloves 12. a child skipping, a white rabbit, a grassy field 13. a violin, a canary, a tree 14. flies caught in a spider web, a net full of fish, a dusty old cabin 15. cancer, crabgrass, a hospital garden 16. messy hair, a mound of spaghetti, a short-order cook 17. a broken bottle, a bum on the street, a trash can 18. a pond, a mirror, a bath 19. an old man in a wheelchair, a lit candle almost burnt down, a smoking

pipe 20. the trunk of a tall tree, a straw in a can of soda, a summer picnic

Study I.-The foregoing 20 items were divided into two sets: I (items 1- 10) and II (items 11-20). Subjects exposed to Set I also responded to 10 of the MTT pictorial items (5, 6, 7, 15, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27). Similarly, subjects administered verbal Set II were also given 10 pictorial MTT items (2, 3, 4, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 22, 28). We shall designate the two pictorial sets of items as Sets A and B, respectively. Items were assigned to the two groups with the aim of achieving a reasonable balance in difficulty and thematic content. Note further that all MTT items converted to verbal form were not used in their standard pictorial form for the purposes of the present investigation.

A total of 136 students (94 females and 42 males) enrolled in a parochial high school in New York City participated in the present study. Sixty subjects responded to verbal Set I and pictorial Set A items; 76 subjects responded to Set II and Set B items. Subjects ranged from 16 to 18 years of age, and all but four (juniors) were drawn from the senior class. The study was conducted in intact classrooms.

Subjects were informed that they would see pairs of slides containing either pictures or phrases. Upon the exposure of each pair, subjects were expected to write a metaphor or simile comparing the members of the pair. The schematic sentence shown below was on display in the front of the room. " is like because . . . " Slides of the stimulus pairs were projected on two screens at the front of the classroom, each pair exposed for 90 seconds. (Note that the third nonmetaphoric member of the pictorial and verbal triads was not used in the present investigation.) Sub- jects were given response booklets for recording their sentences. Further details of the experimental procedure are available in Connor and Kogan (1980).

All sentences were scored for recognition of the metaphoric relation by means of the three-point MTT scoring scale previously described. For purposes of the present analysis, all sentences receiving scores of 1 or 2 were considered to achieve the criterion of recognition. With this lenient criterion,

42



KOGAN ET AL.

mean scores were skewed toward the high end of the distribution. For pictorial items, the means were 8.28 (Set A) and 8.84 (Set B) out of 10 items; for verbal items, the means were 9.57 (Set I) and 9.34 (Set II), again out of 10. Despite the restriction of range reflected in these mean values, the correlations between the pictorial and verbal items were highly significant-r = .53 for subjects responding to Set I verbal and Set A pictorial items, and r = .66 for subjects responding to Set II verbal and Set B pictorial items. Both coefficients yielded a p value less than .005. These data are clearly in support of the convergent validity of metaphoric operations across the pictorial and verbal domains.

Study II.-The primary purpose of the previous study was the examination of symmetry-asymmetry effects in the recognition of metaphoric similarity. The outcomes of the study permitted the separation of both pictorial and verbal items into symmetrical and asymmetrical sets. For the latter, subjects exhibited a significant preference for one member of the metaphoric pair as topic and for the other member as vehicle. For the symmetrical items, on the other hand, no systematic preference for either member of the pair as topic or vehicle was observed. The major purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of order of presentation-topic or vehicle presented first-on metaphoric comprehension of symmetrical and asymmetrical items. For this purpose, two groups were formed: Group I given the topic first, and Group II given the vehicle first. For symmetrical items, of course, topic and vehicle designations are entirely arbitrary. This order-of-presentation effect is of marginal relevance to this Monograph. Rather, given the fact that subjects in both groups were again exposed to both pictorial and verbal items, it is possible once more to examine the generality of metaphoric comprehension across domains.

As in Study I, subjects (N = 52) were juniors and seniors at two New York City parochial high schools. Twenty-four subjects (8 females, 16 males) were assigned to Group I; the remaining 28 subjects (11 females, 17 males) were assigned to Group II. Depending on the group, the topic or vehicle stimulus (randomly chosen for symmetrical items) was exposed alone for 10 seconds. Subjects were then shown the other member of the metaphoric pair as well as the third member of the triad for an additional 10 seconds. They were asked to choose the one that made the best pair. The basis for pairing also had to be supplied. Subjects were further asked whether the less- preferred member could also be paired with the initial stimulus, and, if so, they again had to supply a reason for the pairing. This procedure insured that subjects would at least attend to the metaphoric pair. The procedure described above was carried out for the same 22 triads in both Groups I and II. Eleven of the triads were pictorial (MTT items 3, 6, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, and 28); the remaining 11 were verbal (items 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 19, 20). The study was run in intact classes, and subjects wrote

43



MONOGRAPHS

their answers in response booklets provided for the purpose. These were scored with the three-point MTT scale discussed previously.

For both Groups I and II, the pictorial-verbal correlation coefficients were significant at the .01 level--r's of .65 and .48, respectively. The mean scores for metaphoric comprehension were virtually identical in Groups I and II-26.54 and 26.18, respectively. These findings, in short, lend further

support to the convergent validity evidence reported in Study I. Discussion.-The foregoing two studies employed somewhat different

procedures for assessing metaphoric comprehension, yet both generated results strongly suggestive of cross-media consistency. In the context of these

studies, comparable cognitive processes seem to distinguish metaphoric operations in the pictorial and verbal domains. A cautionary note is in order, however. Both studies were based on older adolescent samples, and hence we cannot be sure whether the consistency observed would extend to samples of younger children. This relates to the issue of why consistency occurs. Is it the fact that subjects engage in verbal encoding of pictorial stimuli when

making metaphoric connections, or do they bring imagery to bear upon verbal stimuli, creating "pictures in the mind," so to speak? Perhaps both kinds of processes are at work, or possibly one or the other process is dominant in particular individuals. In any case, these processes would seem to contribute to pictorial-verbal consistency. Developmental variation in verbal

encoding and imagery processes, however, might well affect the extent of

consistency across age as well as the differential level of comprehension of

metaphors presented pictorially and verbally. It is evident that further research is required to shed light on these problems.

CORRELATIONS WITH TEACHER'S RATINGS

Exploratory Work For several of the samples studied, it was possible to obtain the coopera-

tion of teachers for the purpose of rating the children on a number of potentially relevant socioemotional and cognitive dimensions. In the initial work (samples B1 and B2), we used the nine behavior rating scales employed in the Wallach-Kogan (1965, p. 71) research. Not a single one of those scales yielded a significant relation with the total metaphor score. Two additional scales were added to the foregoing nine-one inquiring about the child's originality ("displays originality by showing novel, imaginative responses to classwork"), the other concerned with the child's "display of esthetic sensitivity." As table 12 indicates, the originality rating was significantly related to the MTT score only in sample B2. Esthetic sensitivity, on the other hand, was significantly related to the total metaphor score in both samples B, and B2. Note that an intellective aptitude rating was unrelated to MTT performance in these samples.

44



KOGAN ET AL.

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Further Studies Procedure.-In subsequent research with samples A3 and E, the Wallach-

Kogan scales were abandoned, and new teacher-rating scales of different content and format were devised. Instructions to the teachers are presented below.

The children in your class have been participating in a study of sensitivity to metaphor. We would now appreciate receiving some further information from you about these children.

Each of the following pages contains a statement describing a particular type of behavior, followed by five possible categories:

1. This statement is most characteristic of the following children: 2. This statement is somewhat characteristic of the following children: 3. This statement is neither characteristic nor uncharacteristic of the

following children: 4. This statement is somewhat uncharacteristic of the following

children: 5. This statement is most uncharacteristic of the following children:

Please list the name of each child in your class under the category that best indicates how a particular description applies to him. It is important that you try to use all five categories. In other words, these are meant to be relative judgments rather than absolute rankings. Placing a child's name under the heading "most uncharacteristic" for a particular statement doesn't necessarily mean that he or she is completely lacking in this quality; rather he or she simply exhibits less of this quality than other children in your class.

Also, please be sure not to omit any names. If you have any doubts about where a particular child belongs, perhaps the middle category would be the best place to list his or her name. It is not necessary to try and rank order the children within each category.

Thank you for your time and your cooperation.

The intention of the foregoing instructions was to make it somewhat easier for teachers to disperse their ratings across the entire scale. Listed below are the scales that were devised for use with samples A3 and E. Scales 1 through 5 were employed in both samples; scales 6 through 9 were given to the teachers of sample A3 children only. In addition, the "originality" and "esthetic sensitivity" scales described earlier were used in both samples.

1. This child uses and is sensitive to figurative language in oral and written work.

2. This child appears to have high intellectual ability whether or not it is expressed in schoolwork.

3. This child responds to humor. 4. This child shows a recognition of the feelings of others, is empathic. 5. This child likes to be by himself (herself) and enjoys solitary activities. 6. This child daydreams, gets lost in reverie.

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KOGAN ET AL.

7. This child becomes strongly involved in what he (she) does, as evidenced by his (her) enthusiastic participation or his (her) unwill- ingness to be distracted.

8. This child is resourceful in initiating activities as evidenced by his (her) ability to provide reasonable alternatives when problems arise.

9. This child is emotionally expressive, using facial, verbal, or gestural means to communicate his feelings.

The number of new scales used was reduced from nine in sample A3 to five in sample E to reduce the work burden on the teachers. As table 12 indicates, the A3 sample sizes are sharply reduced relative to those shown in table 1. This reflects the fact that only one of the two teachers in that sample actually submitted completed ratings. The esthetic sensitivity ratings were not affected by this lack of full cooperation because they were made by the art teacher for both classes.

Results.-Consider first the two scales for which data were available in samples B1 and B2. As table 12 shows, the originality rating manifested little relation to MTT performance in samples A3 and E. On the other hand, esthetic sensitivity, which was consistently related to MTT scores in samples B1 and B2, also yielded significant correlations with MTT performance for females (and males and females combined) in sample A3. For sample E, however, the relevant correlations failed to reach statistically significant levels. This inconsistency across samples may be attributable to the teachers responsible for the ratings. For samples B1, B2, and A3, the ratings were provided by teachers who specialized in the teaching of art. In contrast, the esthetic sensitivity ratings in sample E were provided by the regular classroom teachers. Conceivably, these teachers used somewhat different criteria in making their ratings than did the more specialized art teachers of the children in the other samples.

As in the case of intellective aptitude and achievement test scores, teacher ratings of intellective aptitude yielded between-sample inconsis- tencies in respect to magnitude of correlations with MTT performance. These were substantial in sample A3 but quite negligible in all of the other samples.

We turn next to scales that had not been used in the exploratory work with samples B1 and B2. Of all of the new scales employed, the most impressive outcome was observed in the case of figurative language appreciation and usage. For males and females combined, significant correlations between the foregoing scale and MTT performance were obtained in both samples A3 and E. Note, however, that for the sexes taken separately the correlations achieved significance for females in sample A3 and for males in sample E. It is apparent from table 12 that the figurative language scale was the only one that yielded significant relationships with MTT performance in sample E.

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MONOGRAPHS

The relevance of MTT scores for esthetic sensitivity and figurative language in the classroom receives additional empirical support from findings obtained in sample A2. That sample participated in a training study (see Chapter V), but teacher ratings were obtained and these could be correlated with pretest scores prior to training. Unfortunately, since counterbalancing of items by difficulty level was not entirely successful, the distribution of metaphor scores in one of the two pretest groups was markedly skewed. In the other pretest group, the distribution was relatively flat, and here the correlations between MTT score, on the one hand, and the teacher ratings of esthetic sensitivity and figurative language appreciation, on the other, were statistically significant for both scales for males and females combined (N = 21). The respective r's were .43 (p < .05) for esthetic sensitivity and .53 (p < .01) for figurative language.

In regard to the remaining scales listed in table 12, most would seem to have little relevance for MTT performance. The significant correlation in sample A3 for "prefers solitary activities" was not replicated in sample E. The "involved" scale generated a significant r for the sample A3 total, but this scale appears to be part of an intellective aptitude cluster implicit in the ratings of the classroom teacher in the A3 sample (r = .77, p < .001, for males and females combined). Indeed, the figurative language scale seems to belong to the same cluster, for the part correlation of MTT score and figurative language (with the intellective aptitude rating held constant) equaled .27-a nonsignificant value and a sharp decline from the significant r of .53 listed in table 12. A comparable part correlation analysis carried out in sample E yielded an r of .21--nonsignificant and again a decrease from the significant r (.28) shown in table 12. It is thus evident that teachers are not able to effect a discrimination between the figurative language and general intellective aptitude scales in their ratings, and this necessarily implies that the observed significant r's between MTT performance and figurative language ratings are partly a reflection of the latter's contamination with intellective-aptitude rating variance. This is less of a problem for esthetic sensitivity, where ratings were made by an art teacher for whom general intellective ability would not be of major concern. Thus, part correlations remained significant for esthetic sensitivity in samples B1 and B2. Computa- tion of the relevant part correlation in sample A3 is rendered difficult by the varying sample sizes, though it should be noted that the r between the esthetic sensitivity and intellective aptitude ratings was a mere .14 (for the 20 of 43 children that had been rated by the classroom teacher).

Discussion.--Teacher ratings were obtained in the present research because they offered some possibility of a behavioral classroom-centered criterion that could be used to validate the MTT. We hoped to show that the child's performance on that task bore at least a modest relation to activi-

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KOGAN ET AL.

ties in the school context that, on conceptual grounds, would be expected to require some metaphoric sensitivity.

The pattern of correlations at first appeared quite promising. A fair number of significant correlations emerged for the esthetic sensitivity and figurative language scales, the two scales among the many tried that might be expected to relate to MTT performance. This expectancy was based upon the fact that the MTT is a pictorial instrument that requires a figurative rather than literal approach in order to apprehend the critical similarities. As we have noted, however, there is reason to believe that teachers did not really distinguish between figurative language appreciation and usage, on the one hand, and general intellective aptitude, on the other. Hence, removing this latter source of variance essentially eliminated the link between the MTT and figurative language ratings. The significant associations between MTT performance and esthetic sensitivity ratings seem to be somewhat more robust, but this may depend upon the availability of specialized art teachers to make such ratings.

It is perhaps not surprising that the relationships proved to be so marginal. We made no effort to provide any behavioral guidelines for teachers to follow in making their ratings. It is in fact dubious whether we could have done so. Since the teachers seemed to grasp what the various scales were trying to assess, it appeared prudent at the time to let them define the scales on the basis of their own experience. But as we have seen, the teachers were not really able to distinguish the specific manifestations of figurative language appreciation and usage from general intellective aptitude. The esthetic sensitivity scale, in contrast, may well be more discriminable from a global aptitude dimension.

If future research along these lines is to be pursued, it is essential that we determine the cues that teachers employ in making their judgments of such characteristics as figurative language usage and esthetic sensitivity. With such information available, it might prove feasible to construct refined scales with clear behavioral referents in contrast to the global dimensions employed in the present research.

In sum, there is reason to believe that the type of cognitive skill tapped by the MTT has some bearing on the child's performance in the classroom setting.1' The attempt to capture such classroom behaviors through the vehicle of global teacher ratings was only partially successful. Nevertheless, there is a promising direction here that is clearly worthy of further research attention.

10 In a visit to school B, the authors noted that a recent school assignment (pasted on the classroom walls) required that the pupils transform a poem into a pictorial representation.

49



V. TRAINING METAPHORIC THINKING

Three experiments have been carried out to examine the effect of various short-term interventions on MTT performance. Such studies are important in the sense of informing us whether the mean levels observed for the various age groups represent maximal metaphoric competence. Ex- perimental training studies can offer insights into the processes involved in MTT performance, and they open the possibility of applied programs aimed at enhancing metaphoric thinking in the classroom. In all three of the studies described, a prepost design was used with appropriate control groups, and analysis of covariance was applied with pretest MTT scores serving as the covariate." In each study, children were told that they were participating in a research project concerned with the way people think about pictures. A female graduate student (KC) served as the experimenter for all of the training studies. The three-point MTT scoring system described earlier was employed for rating pretest and posttest responses in each experiment.

EXPERIMENT I

Subjects and Procedure Sample A2 (see table 1) served as subjects in the present study. Each

child was seen individually in a single session of approximately 25 minutes duration. MTT Set I items were divided into two subsets of seven items each (one item was discarded). Half of the children were pretested on the first subset, while the remaining half were given the second subset as a pretest.

After pretesting, the children randomly assigned to the training condition (12 males and 10 females) were offered feedback on the pretest items. The experimenter presented each pretest item again and provided brief

"1 A test of homogeneity of regression was carried out for each analysis, and the resultant F values were uniformly nonsignificant. Hence, the slopes of the regression lines formed by pre- and posttest scores in all three ANCOVAs were homogeneously parallel, thus fulfilling the assumption for testing treatment effects.

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KOGAN ET AL.

explanations for each of the three possible pairings. The children then responded to the seven items in the alternate subset.

As the experiment was originally conceived, all of the control children (11 males and 10 females) were to engage in a Twenty Questions game with the experimenter between the administration of the pretest and posttest MTT items. Only 13 children (seven males and six females) actually served in this control condition, however. As the experiment proceeded, it became apparent that the experimental children were not only receiving feedback about bases for pairing but were also learning that each item offered three alternatives. Hence, an additional control was essential, one in which the children were specifically requested to generate three pairings for each item. Accordingly, the children in the original control group who had not yet participated (four males and four females) were diverted to an exhaustive- pairing condition. For the posttest items (following the Twenty Questions game), these children were explicitly informed that each picture could be paired with each of the others. The experimenter asked the children to indicate the basis for putting together each pair within a triad.

Results Given the small and unequal cell frequencies, the analysis was carried

out for males and females combined. A one-factor analysis of covariance (pretest scores as covariate) yielded a significant treatment effect, F(2,40) = 4.18, p < .025. It is strikingly clear from figure 3, however, that the exhaustive-pairing control condition was almost as effective as the experimental metaphor-explanation condition in enhancing metaphoric sensitivity. Discussion

Various reasons can be advanced for the improvements in metaphoric thinking produced by the experimental manipulations described above. One

SPretest 8ii Post-test

0

c 4

C)

o ~ 6

S; .... -. -. -.-.-.-

2

0 Metaphor Control Exhaustive

Explanation Pairing

FIGURE 3.-Pre- to posttest change in MTT score in sample A2 under conditions of metaphor explanation, standard control, and exhaustive-pairing control.

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MONOGRAPHS

possible conjecture is that the more literal categorical and functional pairings are deemed more desirable by the child. Formal schooling in the early primary grades very likely encourages this tendency. When the child is forced to deal with all three pairs, the expressive properties linking the metaphoric pairings are detected. Conceivably, these are less preferred, and hence are less likely to be reported under conditions where all three pairings are not required. For the children in the experimental training conditions, the

metaphoric pairings must be deemed highly acceptable by virtue of their endorsement by the experimenter in the "feedback" training period. All of this suggests that there might be some inhibition in reporting metaphoric pairings because of their unconventionality (relative to the more conventional categorical and functional pairs). Alternatively, the metaphoric pairings simply may be more difficult to detect, with the consequence that the added effort of exhaustive pairing or the examiner's demonstration of meta-

phoric possibilities serves to render the metaphoric linkages more accessible.

EXPERIMENT II

Subjects and Procedure This second training study was carried out on sample A1 (see table 1).

Given the age of the sample, the modified format for MTT presentation was used (shown below the double line in fig. 1). The present experiment was comparable to the previous one in its general design, except that an exhaustive-pairing condition was no longer necessary. Again, the experimental group received feedback on pretest items and the control group played a Twenty-Questions game with the experimenter. In the present study, feedback was provided only for those triads in which the metaphoric pair was missed in the pretest. Nine males and 11 females were randomly assigned to either experimental or control group. Again, MTT items were divided into counterbalanced seven-item sets.

Results A two-factor analysis of covariance (pretest scores as the covariate) was

applied to the data. No significant subject-sex effect was observed (either as main effect or in interaction with treatments). On the other hand, a significant treatment effect was observed, F(1,35) = 5.92, p < .025. As figure 4 shows, information feedback on the pretest items enhanced posttest metaphoric performance quite dramatically. Posttest scores for the experimental subjects were almost twice the level of pretest scores.

Discussion In the case of Experiment I, we observed that the additional effort

required to search for all three pairings raised MTT performance almost to

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KOGAN ET AL.

8 * Pretest Post- test

o6

Experimental Control

FIGURE 4.-Pre- to posttest change in MTT score in sample A2 under experimental (metaphor explanation) and standard control conditions.

the same degree as explanatory feedback. With the younger subjects of Experiment II, the standard form of the MTT posed too many difficulties, and hence the modified form shown in figure 1 was employed. With this form, the child was required to deal with the metaphoric pair in both the pretest and posttest. Hence, the observed experimental-control difference cannot be attributed to greater or lesser opportunity to search for metaphoric linkages. Rather, it appears that the children in the experimental group by virtue of the feedback provided are learning something about metaphoric similarity, and they seem able to utilize this newly acquired knowledge in detecting the presence of metaphoric relationships in a different set of items. Of course, one cannot rule out the possibility of inhibition of verbal report, with the experimental feedback serving as a releasing mecha- nism. Whatever the ultimate interpretation, however, the evidence offered in Experiments I and II clearly indicates that the appreciation of visual metaphor in children ranging from 7 to 9 years of age can be markedly enhanced by simple, short-term training techniques.

EXPERIMENT III

The previous two experiments were addressed to the question of the modifiability of children's metaphoric comprehension. As we have seen, short-term interventions did enhance MTT performance, though the processes that account for such enhancement have not yet been definitively established. In the present experiment, the intent is to focus on a component process that might conceivably interfere with metaphoric understanding in a visual medium. In order for children to apprehend the metaphorical basis of the relationship between the critical pair of pictures for each item, it is essential that they attend to the relevant features of the respective pictures. To the degree that the child's encoding of a picture contains irrelevant

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MONOGRAPHS

attributes (from the standpoint of forming a metaphoric connection), performance on the MTT should suffer as a consequence. This is not to imply that appropriate encoding of each member of the critical pair will insure

sensitivity to the underlying metaphor. We are dealing here with a neces-

sary, though not a sufficient, condition for metaphoric competence. If the

foregoing conjecture has any validity, it should be possible to improve children's metaphoric skill by insuring appropriate encoding of each of the

pictures in the triad. This was accomplished in the present study through the use of verbal labels provided by the experimenter for all of the pictures.

Subjects and Procedure The children of sample D (see table 1) served as subjects in the present

experiment. They were randomly assigned to an experimental and two control conditions. Fourteen of the items were used for a pretest, with items counterbalanced within each condition. Item 9 (the most difficult on the basis of earlier data) was assigned to both posttests. After an interval of 1 month, children responded to the other half of the items under experimental or control conditions.

In the case of the experimental group, appropriate labels were typed on 3 X 5 index cards, and each was placed above its matching picture. The verbal descriptions of the MTT items (on p. 13) represent the labels that were used. Subjects were told that they might find the labels helpful in de-

tecting similarities between the pictures. Two control groups were necessary-a standard control in which no

labels were provided, and a label control. In the latter, the children generated their own labels for each of the pictures in a triad prior to searching for pairwise similarities. The experimenter asked the children to provide a word or brief phrase that best described each picture. These were recorded

by the experimenter on 3 X 5 index cards, and each was placed above its matching picture in the triad. Again, children were told that the labels might help them in finding connections between pairs of pictures.

Since there was no guarantee that the child-generated labels would be consistently adequate for subsequent metaphoric pairing, we might expect that the foregoing condition would produce a lower level of performance relative to the condition offering experimenter-provided labels. Indeed, there is little reason to expect any difference between the two control conditions, for the child-labeling group merely made overt whatever covert labeling process distinguished the standard control. Nevertheless, the mere introduction of verbal labeling (whether experimentally provided or child produced) might have unforeseen effects, and hence two control groups were deemed necessary.

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KOGAN ET AL.

Results A two-factor analysis of covariance (pretest scores as the covariate)

yielded a highly significant effect for treatments, F(2,96) = 30.64, p < .001. Neither sex of subject nor the sex-by-treatment interaction generated significant effects. Inspection of the means shown in figure 5 indicates similar im-

provements in the own-labeling and control groups from pretest to posttest (3.1 and 3.5, respectively). By contrast, an increase of 11.1 points was obtained in the experimenter-labeling group.

Though the provision of labels by the experimenter raised MTT performance levels by a substantial degree, some of the items yielded stronger effects than did others. Table 13 presents posttest item means for the three conditions of the experiment. Items can be roughly classified into three types. Of least interest are those items (e.g., 1, 5, 6, 11) where ceiling effects were observed. Here, the performance in the own-label and standard control conditions was quite high, hence placing limits on the extent of improvement possible when the experimenter provided the labels. A second item type (e.g., 4, 12, 13, 20, 27) can be distinguished on the basis of the general weakness of the treatment effect (relative to the overall mean difference). Finally, the third type of item (e.g., 2, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 28, 29) yielded effects that were stronger than that reflected by the overall mean difference.

It is, of course, the contrast between the latter two item types that is of interest. Examination of the items yielding weak effects strongly suggests that each member of the critical pair is a highly compelling and unambigu- ous stimulus in the sense that it is difficult to envision more than a single form of encoding. Thus, item 4 offered a "wilted plant" and a "hot, tired runner"; item 12 contained a "plane on fire" and "fish on a hook"; item 13 presented an "old man" and a "candle nearly burnt down"; item 20 showed a "rooster

Pretest

25 Post-test

v 20 o

10E

oT i Own Provided Control Label Label

FIGURE 5.-Pre- to posttest change in MTT score in sample D under conditions of experimenter-provided labels, own-label control, and standard control.

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MONOGRAPHS

TABLE 13

POSTTEST ITEM MEANS FOR EXPERIMENT III

CONDITIONS

ITEM NO. Exp. Label Own Label Control

1 ........... ......... 1.71 1.50 1.62 2 .................... 1.12 .12 .12 3 .................... 1.69 1.19 .94 4 .................... 1.37 1.31 1.00 5 .................... 1.77 1.61 1.81 6.................... 1.77 1.72 1.25 7 .................... 1.50 1.33 .69 8 .................... 1.31 .81 .71 9 .................... 1.24 .38 .24 10 ................... 1.50 1.00 .71 11 ............ ....... 1.94 1.87 1.59 12 ........... ........ 1.25 .94 .94 13................... 1.12 .83 1.06 14 ................... 1.75 .69 .29 15 ................... 1.12 .28 .45 16 ................... 1.59 .50 .62 17 ................... 1.62 .50 .24 18 ................... 1.65 .89 1.37 19................... 1.00 .37 .59 20................... .76 .83 1.00 21 ................... 1.94 1.44 1.53 22 ................... 1.65 .89 1.00 23 ................... .41 .17 .12 24 ................... 1.77 1.44 1.31 25 ................... 1.19 .25 .12 26................... 1.75 1.06 1.29 27 .................. 1.56 1.37 .94 28 ................... 1.77 .83 .81 29 ........... ........ 1.18 .55 .31 Grand mean........... 1.44 .90 .83

crowing" and a "farmer showing his muscles"; item 27 displayed an "explosion" and a "man in a rage." For all of these items, the pictures could be "read" in but one way (excluding the bizarre), and hence there was little conveyed by the verbal label that would not be present in a spontaneous encoding. In other words, failure to detect a metaphoric similarity in these items could not be attributed to faulty encoding of the pictures. Rather, the difficulty had to lie in the child's inability to comprehend the "ground" of the metaphor.

Those items, in contrast, that manifested the strongest treatment effects were of a different character than those described above. Given the sizable number of such items, only a few of them will be considered here. For most of them, the pictures were more "complex" in the sense that alternative encodings were possible. Item 2, for example, offered the labels of "snake" and "winding river" for the metaphoric pair. The former provided little information to the child, for it is hard to imagine an alternative encoding for the picture of a snake. In the case of the winding river, on the other hand,

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KOGAN ET AL.

the "winding" property of the river was but one of several possible encodings (e.g., river flowing through a pretty landscape, river of blue water, river for fishing). None of these alternative encodings would be particularly helpful, of course, in noting the configurational snakelike property of the river. The label of winding river, of course, alerted the children to that very property, and as the means in table 13 indicate, dramatically increased the probability of apprehending the critical similarity.

Let us briefly consider some of the other items that yielded strong treatment effects. In the case of item 9, the encoding of "house with shades pulled down" was but one of several possible encodings of that picture. Unless the picture was encoded that way, however, there was little likelihood that the child would recognize the visual metaphoric similarity to the "woman with closed eyes." It is evident that the provision of labels for appropriate encoding dramatically facilitated the apprehension of the metaphoric connection in one of the most difficult of MTT items (see tables 2 and 3). At first glance, item 15 ("baby" and "rosebud" as labels) would appear to be an anomaly, for alternative encodings are not immediately apparent. It is likely, however, that many young children did not recognize the picture of the flower as a budding rose. The label, of course, made this explicit and facilitated recognition of the metaphoric connection. Inspection of the remaining items of the present type reinforced the view that one or both members of the metaphoric pair did not call forth a single obvious encoding, and hence the labels, by pointing the child to the appropriate encoding of the pictures, facilitated the search for the metaphoric connection.

One additional analysis was carried out on the data of Experiment III. In the case of the children assigned to the own-label condition, one would naturally expect individual variation in the degree to which the labels contributed to or detracted from the understanding of particular metaphors. Indeed, one can directly test the hypothesis that those children who generated labels calling attention to the relevant aspects of the pictures were more likely to apprehend the metaphor than were children who offered irrelevant or distracting labels.

Given item counterbalancing, the analyses were based on 17 children for each item. Each of the critical labels supplied for a given item was rated on a three-point scale as 2 (facilitating-label called attention to relevant aspects), 1 (neutral or irrelevant), or 0 (distracting). Ratings for the two critical labels were then summed to yield a set of scores ranging from 0 to 4. Detection of the metaphoric connection, it will be recalled, was rated on a 0-2 scale. This information was not available to the rater when labels were being rated. For the present analyses, both variables were dichotomized-for appropriateness of labels, a "plus" assigned to scores of 3 or 4 and a "minus" to scores of 0-2; for metaphoric comprehension, a "plus" assigned to scores of 1 or 2, and a "minus" to a score of 0. Fisher's exact test was then applied to

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MONOGRAPHS

the resultant 2 X 2 item distributions. For the 27 (out of 29) items where the marginals for the MTT item score were not extremely skewed, only one of the 27 yielded a p value less than .05. An additional four items were of border- line significance (p < .10). This is hardly an impressive result, and hence it is reasonable to conclude that the hypothesis has not been confirmed. It is apparent that the children who participated in the present experiment did not attach the same significance to appropriate labels when generated by themselves and when supplied by the experimenter.

Discussion The foregoing results strongly suggest that mislabeling (or inappropriate

encoding) of particular stimuli can interfere with the recognition of metaphoric similarities between them. The provision of appropriate labels makes clear that the metaphoric competence of children in the 9-10 age range may be somewhat greater than is revealed in the customary condition of administration (use of unlabeled pictures). These findings indicate that metaphoric competence on a visual task such as the MTT involves more than the ability to make a particular kind of connection; it may also depend on selecting and attending to relevant stimulus dimensions. Both of these aspects must evidently be considered in our efforts to understand developmental shifts in visual metaphoric competence.

Item analyses tended to support the conclusions stated above. When the critical pair within a triad was composed of pictures that "pulled" a uniform distinctive encoding, labels represented little more than redundant information. Hence, their availability had negligible influence on the detection of the metaphoric similarity in the item. On the other hand, if one or both members of the critical pair were represented by pictures that lent themselves to alternative encodings (more global vs. more detailed, e.g.), the labels served the function of directing the child's attention to the critical features of the pictures. Heightened sensitivity to the metaphoric relation present within the item followed as a natural consequence.

The dramatic improvement in performance with experimenter-provided labels can be further appreciated by comparing the overall mean shown in table 13 with the item means presented in table 1. It is evident that the performance of the children is comparable to that of well-educated mature adults. This is somewhat misleading, of course, for the present experiment made use of the modified MTT format, where performance levels were generally higher. Furthermore, one must acknowledge that to provide labels is in essence to subvert the visual nature of the task. We are, after all, interested in the child's sensitivity to visual metaphor, and hence one can legitimately argue that the search for critical pictorial features represents an integral part of the construct under study. Labels tell the child where to look, and hence the visual search aspect of the task is to a great extent short-

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KOGAN ET AL.

circuited. At the same time, we may (through the use of labels) be inadver- tently training children "how to see." To resolve this issue, we would have to examine the effect of. verbal labeling on a different set of MTT items presented without labels. Such a study has not yet been carried out.

The most puzzling outcome of Experiment III is the indication that children who spontaneously generated metaphorically appropriate labels did not grasp the metaphoric similarity any better than children who offered irrelevant or distracting labels. It appears that the children in the own-label condition regarded the generation of labels and the search for similarities as independent tasks. Given the findings of the provided-label condition, we must tentatively offer the inference that the children placed greater value upon information supplied by the experimenter than upon identical information produced by themselves. It appears as if children regarded the provided labels as authoritative, and hence they actively used them in searching for metaphoric connections. Clearly, the child's own labels, even when highly relevant, did not generate the same level of confidence. The children seemed unwilling or unable to make use of them in tracking down the metaphoric similarities. Results such as these suggest the need for training that enhances children's confidence in the value of their own cognitive products.

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VI. CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In contrast with the stage-oriented approach that has characterized most developmental studies of metaphoric operations (e.g., Billow 1975; Cometa & Eson 1978; Gardner, Kircher, Winner, & Perkins 1975; Winner et al. 1976), the present Monograph offers an alternative perspective focusing upon both individual and age differences in metaphoric comprehension. It is our considered opinion that sensitivity to metaphoric relations can be conceptualized as a cognitive-style construct. Most of the questions directed at this construct in the foregoing pages are precisely those that have been put to other more established styles (e.g., field dependence, reflection-impulsiv- ity, styles of conceptualization). In particular, we have inquired into the construct's reliability, stability, convergent and discriminant validity, pre- dictive utility, and modifiability. In addition, we have examined cross- sectional age differences extending from the primary school years (median age of 7V2) through young adulthood (median age of about 28). Let us spell these out in somewhat greater detail.

First and foremost, a new reliable instrument has been developed in a domain-comprehension of visual metaphor-where no such instrument existed before.'2 The Metaphoric Triads Task has proven to be easily scor-

"12 It is possible to argue that the MTT is a test of production rather than comprehension on the grounds that the subject is expected to create a metaphoric grouping from the materials at hand. Such an argument lacks force in the present context, for the triads were deliberately constructed to contain a metaphoric pairing. The metaphor, so to speak, is latent within the stimulus material. This tends not to be the case in a production task where response options have to be generated from the subject's internal schemata. Illus- trative is the Gardner et al. (1975) research in which the completion of vignettes was scored for the metaphoric quality of the ending provided. The term "metaphoric production" has also been applied to the spontaneous emergence of metaphoric expressions in oral speech and written essays. Though it will be granted that the MTT is less purely a comprehension task than is the interpretation of metaphoric sentences, it is our considered judgment that the MTT is considerably closer to comprehension than production in its inherent aspect. Hence, to apply the term "production" to performance in the present task context would only serve to add confusion.

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able, highly reliable, and appropriate for a broad age range extending from children in the beginning elementary grades through the adult years. Thus far, we have not administered the MTT to middle-aged and older adults, but we can think of no reason why that instrument would not be applicable to these older age groups given the absence of ceiling effects in graduate students. Indeed, the study of the developmental course of metaphoric comprehension across the entire life span represents one of the challenging research goals for the future.

In respect to construct validity, the data for both the child and adult samples strongly supports a link between MTT performance and the quality of responses to DT tasks. Such findings make good theoretical sense and are reasonably consistent with other evidence (Malgady 1977). The production of unusual, yet fitting, interpretations of abstract patterns involves a kind of visual cross-categorical thinking that has aspects in common with the comprehension of visual metaphor. There are differences between the two domains, however-production as opposed to comprehension, and a visual- verbal contrast if the verbal alternate-uses task is employed. These dis- tinctions are reflected in the fact that the correlations, though significant, were modest in magnitude overall and less consistent when the DT domain was represented by a verbal as opposed to a visual procedure.

Further construct-validational evidence was found for young adults in the form of significant correlations between MTT scores, on the one hand, and category breadth and physiognomic-sensitivity indices, on the other. Again, these relationships are theoretically reasonable and well worthy of further study in samples of children. Indeed, childhood versions of both category-breadth and physiognomic-sensitivity tasks are available in the published literature (see Wallach & Kogan 1965), and hence replications with children would be a relatively straightforward matter.

The most powerful convergent-validational evidence is the indication that metaphoric comprehension generalizes from the visual MTT to an analogous verbal instrument. There are limits to this generalization, however, at the present stage of our knowledge. The design of the relevant studies was directed to issues other than convergent validity, and hence modi- fications of the MTT task and administration procedures were unique to the two studies under consideration. Further, the results are thus far confined to older adolescent samples. Nevertheless, the findings represent a promising beginning for further developmental work on the consistency of metaphoric comprehension across pictorial and verbal media.

On the side of discriminant validation, the evidence is quite mixed. We had hoped to show that MTT performance is quite independent of the kinds of cognitive skills tapped by standardized aptitude and achievement tests. Such separation had been obtained in the DT domain in numerous studies (Wallach 1971), implying a genuine intelligence-creativity distinction at

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the level of test performance. No such sharp distinction was observed in the domain of metaphor in the present study. Though the correlational pattern could best be described as erratic, the number of significant and nearly significant coefficients was sufficiently large to suggest that the comprehension of visual metaphor is not completely independent of more conventional intellective abilities. In retrospect, this should come as no great surprise, for the MTT is a convergent-thinking task-the metaphoric connection is keyed correct-and all such tasks appear to have some "g" saturation. It is essentially the break with the convergent task structure that accounts for the statistical independence of divergent-thinking and traditional intelligence assessments. Thus, when a purported "creativity" instrument is cast in a convergent-thinking format-for example, the RAT (Mednick 1962)- significant correlations with intellective abilities emerge (see Wallach 1970).

There is an additional issue here, however, and it has little to do with task structure. Standardized tests of aptitude and achievement in the elementary grades assume a base of real-world knowledge on the part of the child. To the degree that the child lacks this knowledge, his or her performance will suffer. In a corresponding fashion, understanding metaphors also rests on some real-world knowledge base. The pictorial format of the MTT does not preclude the need for such knowledge. To give some examples, the child must know that a parched plant needs water, that a yellow bird with its mouth open is likely to be a singing canary, that a fish on the end of a hook will soon die. Many additional examples from the MTT could be cited, all pointing to particular real-world knowledge as a prerequisite for metaphoric comprehension. The child lacking this kind of basic knowledge would probably do poorly on standardized intelligence tests as well.

It will be recalled that better performance on the MTT was associated with the ability to solve the more difficult (foil) analogies. There does not seem to be much doubt that there is an analogical component to metaphoric operations, though most analogies would not qualify as metaphors. Consider MTT item 15, where the metaphoric pair consists of a baby and a rosebud. There is an implicit analogy here which could be expanded and made explicit in the following form: baby is to adult as rosebud is to a fully blos- soming rose. Similarly for item 3, a fully expanded analogy might take the following shape: angry man is to shouting and gesticulating as storm is to thunder and lightning. From these expanded analogies, one can then proceed to find a baby and a rosebud similar because each is at an early stage of life and will grow to maturity; an angry man and a storm will be found similar because each generates a great deal of noise and excitement.

We do not know, of course, whether the children who received credit for the foregoing items engaged in the kind of reasoning-by-analogy described. To the degree that such reasoning did take place, the probability of compre- hending the metaphoric similarity would naturally be enhanced. Unfortu-

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nately, correlational evidence does not permit the next step-a strong inference to the effect that higher metaphoric scores come about by virtue of analogical reasoning.

Both of the items given above are conceptual in character, and it is this quality that enables one to construct an equivalent verbal analogy. Many of the MTT items, however, involve configurational similarities, and these do not lend themselves to analogies of the standard kind. The jewels worn by the lady and the city lit up at night share a perceptual sparkling quality. If this quality is not perceived directly, the metaphoric similarity will go unrecognized. It thus appears that analogical reasoning would be useful in metaphoric comprehension when the critical pairing can be expanded into a full-fledged analogy (operative reasoning in the Piagetian sense), but such reasoning would be of limited use when the critical pairing is configurational in character (figurative in the Piagetian sense). Partial support for this inference was found in the sample A3 data. Of the 10 MTT items that were significantly associated with the foil analogies score, only two were configurational in character. It is not clear, however, why some conceptual items did while others did not correlate significantly with the foil analogies score. We recognize, of course, that there is a post hoc quality to the foregoing findings, but there is sufficient promise in them to warrant further research specifically directed to the conditions under which analogical reasoning will and will not be relevant to metaphoric comprehension.

Consistent with research on other cognitive styles, we wanted to show that our construct had some relevance for real-world behaviors. We had to acknowledge that it was virtually impossible to specify in advance those naturalistic classroom behaviors that might reflect metaphoric understanding. Accordingly, as an initial effort, we decided on an indirect and more global approach through teacher ratings. Such data are particularly susceptible to the well-known halo effect, the tendency to lump all positive and all negative attributes together.'3 As a consequence, the indication that children scoring high on the MTT were rated high on a scale of "figurative language appreciation and usage" proved illusory, for part correlations (holding the general intellective aptitude rating constant) failed to achieve statistical significance.

Somewhat more promising is the evidence that ratings of esthetic sensitivity by art teachers correlated significantly with MTT performance. Since such teachers interact with the children in a specialized role context, it is most unlikely that the esthetic sensitivity rating was contaminated by other extraneous factors. Nevertheless, the demonstration of the relationship (which needs further replication) clearly represents the beginning rather than the

13 The use of a child Q sort (Block & Block 1980) might have obviated this problem, but we were in no position to elicit from teachers the kind of time expenditures that would have been required.

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end of inquiry. We would very much like to know the kinds of cues that teachers employ when rating the esthetic sensitivity of a child.

We are dealing with metaphor in a visual medium, of course, and this fact almost certainly contributes to the linkage with the esthetic domain. It will be recalled that the applied arts students in sample F generated higher MTT scores than the psychology undergraduates of sample G. This difference was highly significant (t = 7.75, p < .001). More recently, we have examined the grade-point average (GPA) of sample F students 2 years after they were given the MTT as freshmen. For the 73 students who remained in the program, a correlation of .29 (p < .01) was obtained. For the 28 students specializing in illustration (the largest homogeneous group in the sample), the r was .54 (p < .01). Students in that program are trained to convert verbal-conceptual ideas into vivid and expressive pictorial forms.'4 In sample G, the students were asked about their interest in the visual arts as reflected in visits to galleries and museums. Fava (1978) found that students who attended more frequently were significantly higher in MTT scores than were infrequent attenders (r = .21, p < .05, and .34, p < .01, for males and females, respectively). Although few of the foregoing outcomes have been cross-validated as yet, the overall pattern encourages the belief that the MTT has implications for the realm of visual esthetics.

Few would deny that the area of esthetics is one of the more under- studied in developmental psychology. We know little about the child's involvement with the visual and performing arts, certainly much less than we know about the child's involvement in reading, mathematics, and science. Gardner (1973) is one of the few to have researched and theorized about the developmental aspects of the esthetic domain. The research reported in the present Monograph raises the intriguing possibility that sensitivity to visual metaphor could serve as a "bridge" construct in fostering research in the interface between artistic and general cognitive development.

We come, finally, to the issue of training metaphoric thinking. The first experiment reported offers a good illustration of how procedural and task factors can influence performance on a cognitive task. A simple request to find all three pairings in a triad yielded a significant increment over the level of pretest performance. In another connection, we noted how a simple geometric arrangement of the triad-from a horizontal to a triangular array-elevated MTT scores to a very appreciable degree. Another simple manipulation-informative feedback on pretest items-also produced a substantial enhancement of MTT performance (Experiments I and II). The most dramatic improvement took place in Experiment III under conditions of appropriate experimenter-provided labels for each picture in a triad. It

14 It may be more than coincidental that the two artists who drew the MTT items were outstanding graduates of the program in illustration.

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will be recalled that metaphoric comprehension in 10-year-olds in that condition was virtually at the level of sample H graduate students.

We are not prepared to accept the exceptionally strong statement of Gentner (1977) to the effect that there is little difference between the basic metaphoric competence of children and adults. Nevertheless, we should expect that Gentner would be quite gratified by data reported here, for they clearly show how easily one can induce children to approximate adult levels of metaphoric competence through experimental alteration of task contexts. This statement, of course, must be restricted to the domain of visually mediated metaphor. Other factors would almost certainly come into play when the task involves the interpretation of metaphoric sentences.

There were a number of surprising aspects to the outcomes of Experi- ment III. The dramatic effects of verbal labeling on MTT scores highlights the greater importance that children in the 9-10 age range attach to verbal as opposed to purely pictorial information. When pictorial cues achieve a degree of subtlety or complexity, the effort of visual analysis seems to be too great for the child to bear. Labels, of course, tell the child where and/or how to look at the pictures. It is quite possible, of course, that the particular age group employed in Experiment III-median age of 9Y2-have entered a phase of their schooling where the written word is endowed with great authority. Ironically, this authority did not extend to the child's own labels even when these were appropriate to the metaphoric connection.

There are two inferences that can be drawn from the foregoing results. For children in the upper elementary grades, there is a degree of reluctance or inability to look for visually mediated similarities of a metaphoric character. The children do not seem able or willing to try out alternative encodings, searching for the ones that will bring the metaphoric similarity to the foreground. When the appropriate labels are supplied, the children have little difficulty in encoding each member of the critical pair in a form that permits recognition of the metaphoric linkage. Results such as these imply that children are not trained to analyze pictures carefully and thoroughly; they prefer the more categorical information offered by words. This is not too surprising, for traditional schooling places much more emphasis upon verbal than upon visual literacy. Esthetic educators (e.g., Eisner 1976) have long been aware of this and have encouraged school programs that stress the cultivation of figurative as well as operative modes of cognition.

A second inference that can be drawn from the Experiment III results derives from the evidence generated by the own-label condition. The indication that children encode pictures appropriately (from the standpoint of the metaphorical connection), and nevertheless fail to make that connection, strongly suggests much suspiciousness about or lack of confidence in inferences drawn from pictures. It appears as if the child did not really trust the labels he or she personally supplied, for little effort was then made to bring

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together the relevant encodings of the critical pair of pictures. Highly similar labels provided by the experimenter, in contrast, facilitated the cognitive processing that eventuated in metaphoric comprehension.

It is evident, then, that preadolescent children are not lacking in visual skills. Rather, it would appear that the skills have not been well practiced, and, as a consequence, children lack confidence in visual thinking. Addi- tional support for this inference can be found in Gardner's (1972) research on children's sensitivity to painting styles. From an initial response to paintings almost exclusively on the basis of subject matter, elementary school children become quite sensitive to painting styles after a few weeks of training.

Given the substantial improvements that can be produced by task manipulations and brief training experiences, one is naturally led to ask whether the MTT in its standard form and mode of administration represents a valid indicator of metaphoric comprehension in the child. Perfor- mance on the standard MTT would seem to underestimate metaphoric competence, and hence one can argue that the children exposed to that instrument are developmentally more advanced than their scores would indicate. In reply to this argument, it must be asserted that absolute score levels on the MTT have no intrinsic significance; rather, the scores derive their meaning on a comparative basis--whether across individuals within age or across age groups.

In respect to individual differences, it will be recalled that the homogeneity-of-regression assumption of ANCOVA was met in all three training studies (n. 11). This implies that the rank ordering of children on metaphoric comprehension subsequent to training showed little change relative to pre- training scores. The training essentially adds a constant to each child's performance, and hence does not materially affect the child's status relative to his or her peers. The implication, of course, is that metaphoric comprehension as an individual-differences construct is in no way affected by the experimental manipulations employed. Training does not wipe out individual variation in metaphoric comprehension. Of course, we concede that one could theoretically devise training procedures sufficiently effective to con- strict individual variations.

Consider next the developmental implications of the training outcomes. As we have seen, it is feasible through task modification and feedback training to enhance the level of metaphoric performance of younger subjects to that of subjects 1 to several years older. It must be stressed, however, that such comparisons are not based on identical tasks. Even the oldest age group included in the study did not achieve a ceiling on the standard MTT. This implies that there is room for improvement in all age groups, and hence there is no reason to assume that developmental trends would differ very much as long as all age groups are exposed to the identical tasks and training experiences. On the other hand, as noted earlier, task and

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training effects may have a decreasing impact with increasing age. In the latter case, there would be some compression of the distribution of metaphor scores across the age span from childhood through early adulthood, but it would be very surprising indeed if the developmental trends were to show any disordinal effects with age. Again, however, it would be valuable to replace the foregoing conjectures with some hard data directed to the issue in question.

Training in the experimental studies described earlier was confined to short-term, single-session effects. In respect to more extended training, Pollio et al. (1977) have used workbook exercises developed by the Synectics Com- pany (Making It Strange, 1968) to foster creative writing and thinking in grades 3 through 6. According to Pollio and his associates, the series of exercises are intended to "prepare the child for the use of metaphor as an heuristic in thinking" (1977, p. 199). An example item requests that the child specify "What animal is like a parachute? Why?" Another item calls for the completion of the following statement: "An example of pleasing pain is __because ." Such training may have some impact on children's novel figurative usage in written compositions (though the actual outcomes were, in fact, equivocal); it is difficult to gauge, however, whether this kind of verbal training would have much influence on sensitivity to visual metaphor. Training of the latter kind of competence would have to entail training in how to look at pictures and how to make use of the information extracted from them. This is the sort of thing that was probably accomplished informally in the feedback conditions of Experiments I and II.

Though we have examined the topic of visual metaphoric comprehension from a number of different standpoints, we make no claim that our treatment of that topic has been exhaustive. There are numerous other issues of importance that have yet to be examined empirically. Foremost among these is the matter of developmental change. The sole longitudinal data reported in the present Monograph extended over a 6-month interval. Such data are quite satisfactory for the study of short-term stability; they are entirely inadequate for the examination of developmental change. A related issue is that of developmental antecedents in early childhood. As of the present time, our assessment of metaphoric comprehension has not extended below the kindergarten years of 5-6. We strongly suspect that the MTT (even in its more simple modified form) is too difficult a task for children younger than kindergarten age. Yet, it is dubious that the construct emerges full-blown between the ages of 5 and 6. Further exploration of this problem will clearly require a modification of the MTT for children younger than those studied thus far. Kogan (1976a) has discussed much of the evidence on precursors of cognitive styles in infancy and early childhood. Many of the issues treated there would be analogous to those that would face an investi- gator pursuing the developmental precursors of metaphoric comprehension.

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Another unexplored issue concerns the dimensionality of the Metaphoric Triads Task. Though internal-consistency reliabilities and item-sum correlations of the MTT have been generally high and significant, it would not be warranted to assume unidimensionality of the MTT. Since all of the research with children has been based on individual administration of the MTT to relatively small samples, the subjects-to-items ratio has been too small to encourage the application of factor analysis to these data.

The construction of a group-administered form of the MTT, on the other hand, did permit factor analyses of MTT items in the young-adult samples (F and G). The outcomes of these analyses are reported in Fava (1978). Only a brief summary will be reported here. An informal comparison across the two samples pointed to the presence of a conceptual factor in both involving metaphoric similarities between human beings, on the one hand, and lower animals and plant life, on the other. Though both samples generated a configurational detail factor, it is of interest that the factor was confined to facial comparisons in the psychology students and was more highly generalized in the applied arts students. Finally, the mani- festation of two configurational factors (one involving detailed, the other more global comparisons) and an additional "expressive movement" factor in the applied arts students (in conjunction with the presence of a strong general factor in the psychology students) suggests that the visual metaphoric domain may be more differentiated in the former sample (arts) relative to the latter. This latter inference, however, could be no more than tentative given the fact that (due to time allotments) the psychology students responded to fewer items (21) than did the applied arts students (29).

We have no way of knowing, of course, whether the foregoing factors would be found in younger subjects. If the number of factors can be considered to reflect differentiation within the domain of visual metaphoric comprehension, greater multidimensionality would be expected with increasing age. There are two possible directions here for future research. One would involve the individual administration of the MTT to samples of children larger than those employed in the present research. This would obviously raise the subjects-to-items ratio to acceptable levels for the application of factor analysis. Alternatively, one might extend the use of the group- administered MTT to school-age samples. It is quite unlikely, however, that such a procedure would work for children younger than upper-elementary grade level. Both should be tried, of course, for the specification of the emergence and change of factors of metaphoric comprehension across the period of childhood through young adulthood would represent a genuine advance in our knowledge of the present domain.

Although the issue of visual-verbal or pictorial-verbal consistency has been discussed previously, it is of sufficient importance to warrant further consideration. This issue has arisen with other cognitive constructs as well.

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Thus, research in the area of divergent thinking has yielded verbal-visual generality across a broad age span (Kogan 1971a). On the other hand, there is little relation between performance on the visual Embedded Figures Test -an index of field dependence (Witkin, Dyk, Faterson, Goodenough, & Karp 1962)-and on tasks of verbal embeddedness (Podell & Phillips 1959). Hence, it appears that the extent of visual-verbal consistency varies across cognitive domains.

Exploratory work on visual-verbal consistency in the domain of metaphoric comprehension is reported in this Monograph. The magnitude of the correlations obtained were sufficiently high to suggest that some visual- verbal consistency exists with respect to the comprehension of metaphor. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the set of 20 verbal items (pp. 41-42) employed in that research cannot yet be considered a reliable and validated test. Certainly, the pursuit of visual-verbal consistency (or inconsistency) would require that as much effort be devoted to the construction of a verbal index of metaphor comprehension as has been devoted to the development of the MTT. At the present time, we are not yet able to describe the psychometric properties of a verbal metaphoric task in triad form. Note in this regard that most of the developmentally oriented metaphor research cited earlier has been based on a very limited number of verbal metaphors. We cannot know whether these materials are typical or idiosyncratic of the verbal metaphoric domain unless the effort is made to expand their number to the level of a coherent construct. A step in this direction was recently taken by Malgady (1977), who used 11 similes adapted from Koch's (1970) work. Such an instrument offers promise as a verbal metaphor index for children, though it should be noted that Malgady offered no information about its internal psychometric properties.

Beyond the issue of visual-verbal consistency lies the question of the homogeneity-heterogeneity of the metaphor domain as a whole. A wide variety of cognitive and psycholinguistic tasks can be loosely fit under the metaphor rubric-for example, the MTT and its verbal analogue, metaphoric sentences for paraphrasing, proverbs to be interpreted, synesthetic and physiognomic similarities offered for recognition, sentence stems con- ducive to metaphoric production. We presently do not know whether all of the foregoing cohere in the form of a master metaphor construct or a general metaphor factor. Nor do we know if the extent of specificity-generality is influenced by developmental level.

The foregoing questions are not presently at the forefront of metaphor research. Rather, the currently dominant approach is more molecular- reaching inside the metaphor, so to speak, to examine the intrinsic properties of nonliteral similarity (e.g., Honeck, Riechmann, & Hoffman 1975; John- son 1970; Malgady & Johnson 1976; Ortony 1979a; Verbrugge 1977; Ver- brugge & McCarrell 1977). As we indicated earlier, some of our own re-

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search has moved in this direction (Connor & Kogan 1980). Some of this work, particularly the study of asymmetry effects, was prompted by related developments in other branches of cognitive psychology (e.g., Rosch 1975; Tversky 1977). Much new insight has been gained into what a metaphor is and how it works. As this information is assimilated, the study of metaphor in both its cognitive-developmental and individual-difference aspects will

likely proceed in new productive directions.

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75



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research reported in the present Monograph would not have been possible without the cooperation of a large number of persons. We are grateful to the schools, colleges, and universities that contributed subjects to our research. We should especially like to thank Canon Landon of the Cathedral School, Mrs. Chilton Williamson of the Nightingale-Bamford School, Sheila Sadler of the Village Community School, Pat Green of the Bank Street School for Children, Stanley Seidman of the Hunter College Elementary School, Vieri Salvadori and Mark Ast of the Parsons School of Design, and James Halperin, Antoinette Myers, and Richard Sloan of the College at New Paltz, SUNY. The pictorial-verbal comparison studies were made possible through the cooperation of Hugh Kirwan of the Christ the King Regional High School, Rev. James A. O'Donnell, S.J., of Xavier High School and Rev. Harold J. Robertson of Cathedral High School. Their help is much appreciated.

For assistance in data collection and scoring, we are grateful to Stephanie Fava and Joan Rabertazzi. Lorie Caudle provided much help in computer programming of the data, and Kimberlee Goodwin and Barbara Kaplan carried out numerous statistical analyses. We are indebted to both of them. The artists who prepared the metaphoric triads-Patricia Kerr-Cross and Patricia Slade-played a crucial role in the research. Without their sensitivity and craftsmanship, the research could not have been initiated. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Lisa Rosenberg for her diligent typing of the manuscript in the midst of numerous competing obligations. Finally, we would like to thank former Dean Joseph J. Greenbaum and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research for their generous financial support of the studies described in this Monograph.

76



APPENDIX: PICTORIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE

METAPHORIC TRIADS TASK



MONOGRAPHS

SET I

1. violin*, singing canary*, tree (CC) 2. fish, winding river*, snake* (CF) 3. man in the rain, thunderstorm*, angry man* (P, cc) 4. wilted plant *, hot tired runner*, glass of water (CC, p) 5. spinning top*, girl playing, dancing ballerina* (CF) 6. ancient tree*, rocking chair, a grandfather* (CC, p) 7. broken down house*, moldy swiss cheese*, rat 8. rifle, marching men*, flock of birds* (CF) 9. house with shades pulled down*, bed, woman with closed eyes*

(p, cf) 10. worn-out woman*, grazing goat, barren landscape* (p) 11. snorting bull*, boxer*, leather gloves (CC, p) 12. ocean, plane on fire*, fish on hook* (CC) 13. old man*, candle nearly burned down*, smoking pipe (CC) 14. woman with jewels*, city street, city lit up at night* (CF, cc) 15. rose bud*, baby*, watering can (CC)

SET II 16. drowsy person*, "droopy" house*, living room (cf) 17. foggy street corner*, veiled woman*, moving car (p) 18. weeping willow*, park bench, sad woman* (p) 19. car, car wheel*, traffic circle* (CF) 20. rooster crowing*, barnyard, farmer showing muscles* (CC) 21. girl, melting snowman *, waves running into sandcastle * (CC) 22. wilted flowers*, old woman sick in bed*, vase on table (CC) 23. compass showing directions, thirsty man finds oasis in desert*, ship

in storm guided by lighthouse beam* (CC) 24. watering can, woman with long hair*, hanging plant* (CF) 25. cracks in ice near skating boy*, boy with beehive overhead*,

fishing rod (CC) 26. fly in spider's web*, fishing boat, fish caught in net* (CC, cf) 27. ambulance, explosion*, man in a rage* (P) 28. sunflower*, greenhouse, tall thin woman* (CF) 29. blind man at the top of stairs*, German shepherd dog, ship navi-

gating through rocks at night* (CC)

78



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