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Recent work suggests that though young children can comprehend metaphors based on shared percep-tual or functional features of objects, comprehending metaphors based on abstract relations across do-mains presents a greater challenge. We conducted two pre-registered studies (n = 272; mean age = 3.77 years; 143 female) to investigate children’s ability to understand metaphors based on object and abstract similarities. We also assessed how children’s language learning environments (monolingual or bilin-gual) relate to their metaphor comprehension. Children were successful in understanding both types of metaphors. In addition, monolingual and bilingual children were equally proficient in metaphor com-prehension. These findings highlight the sophisticated ways that preschool-aged children can use their rapidly developing lexicons. 

Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time (long sound) and pitch (high sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the ability to associate space with other domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task. We probed cross-domain relations that are expressed in English metaphors for time and pitch (length-time and height-pitch), as well as relations that are unconventional in English but expressed in other languages (size-time and thickness-pitch). Participants were tested with a perceptual matching task, in which they matched between spatial stimuli and sounds of different durations or pitches, and a linguistic matching task, in which they matched between a label denoting a spatial attribute, duration, or pitch, and a picture or sound representing another dimension. Contrary to previous claims that experience with linguistic metaphors is necessary for children to make cross-domain mappings, children performed above chance for both familiar and unfamiliar relations in both tasks, as did adults. Children’s performance was also better when a label was provided for one of the dimensions, but only when making length-time, size-time, and height-pitch mappings (not thickness-pitch mappings). These findings suggest that, although experience with metaphorical language is not necessary to make cross-domain mappings, labels can promote these mappings, both when they have familiar metaphorical uses (e.g., English ‘long’ denotes both length and duration), and when they describe dimensions that share a common ordinal reference frame (e.g., size and duration, but not thickness and pitch).