Comprensión de metáforas y su relación con la comprensión lectora y el rendimiento escolar

Nowadays it is considered that understanding metaphors is an activity present in children at a very early stage, and it develops progressively with age. But factors and processes implied in this development are scarcely known. In this work some aspects of this development are studied: differences in metaphor understanding between 2nd and 4th grade students of Primary School, comprehension of different types of metaphor, relation between sentences using the same lexical items but presented as nominal metaphor, simile or as a quotation said by a third person, and relation of metaphor understanding to academic results and reading comprehension. Results corroborate the effect of age on metaphor understanding. There are no differences in understanding distinct types of metaphoric sentences, nor different syntactic forms used to express relations between the metaphoric terms. Regarding academic results, it is been found that, in 2nd grade, there is a group of students who produce preferentially attributive responses to metaphoric sentences. This group obtains better results in a reading comprehension test. There are also differences in mathematic results depending on responses given by students to metaphoric sentences.