Figurative language development/acquisition research: Status and ways forward

Attempting to understand children's figurative language acquisition/development has been an ongoing effort for decades from a variety of approaches and on a range of figures. Goals have differed from Psychology through ally disciplines to Linguistics, with analyses targeting co-development through disorders to general processes in acquisition. Psychology has typically turned to skills and abilities paralleling figurative language development (e.g., multi- and meta-representation). Linguistics has generally grappled with whether holistic or piecemeal approaches are best-the latter involving different explanations for different figures (e.g., standard pragmatic model and early conceptual metaphor theory, versus relevance theory). Mixtures of both disciplines have also been involved, as have approaches interested mainly in phenomena accompanying figurative language development/acquisition (e.g., reading, disorders, education), but including figurative abilities as measures in their research. The outcome of these efforts is a vast, complex set of partially interlocking literatures with much variability involving figures treated, processes involved, deficits or disorders measured and motivations for exploration. The set of cognitive/linguistic processes seen to underlie figurative abilities have also not changed drastically across this research era, nor have many of the empirical tools of assessment. Two alternative approaches are offered to potentially revitalize the headway in our endeavor to understand figurative language acquisition/development-one based on embodied simulations and another on pragmatic effects. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.