Situated within the framework of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this research focuses on the comprehension of primary metaphors, using a crosslinguistic-developmental perspective. Data come from interviews with monolingual Brazilian Portuguese and American English native speakers at the ages of 3 to 10, along with adult native speakers. The results obtained from two tasks (verbal and non-verbal) revealed that the comprehension of primary metaphors is an ability that emerges early in life and is linked to the kind of mapping involved in each conceptual metaphor. The comprehension of primary metaphors followed three stages both for the Brazilian and the American participants.
primary metaphors; language acquisition; figurative language development; cognitive linguistics
