Examining children’s simile comprehension skills

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the children’s skills of comprehending similes. The participants of the research consisted of 120 children that were aged 5-6 and enrolled in preschool education institutions. The data were collected with a 16-item success test. The items in the test were orally administered to the participants during the interviews. The responses were recorded, and the analysis was carried out through the evaluation of the content of the recordings by two experts. The answers were encoded and transferred to the statistics program. Depending on the research questions, descriptive statistics were calculated, and a series of Mann Whitney U test was performed. According to the findings, the success rate of the item about simile comprehension at which participants were most successful appeared to be 56.7%. In addition, it was found that the participants’ levels of simile comprehension did not differ based on gender, but they differed based on their duration of continuing preschool education. Participants attending public schools were more successful than those attending private preschools, and the 6-year-old children appeared to be more successful than the 5-year-olds.

Keywords: Comprehension, figurative language, language acquisition, simile, metaphor;