Metaphor comprehension and use in monolingual and bilinguals

The aim of the present study was to compare Metaphor comprehension and use in monolingual and bilingual adults. A total number of 60 subjects in witch these are divided in to genders group I group II. 30 monolingual Telugu native speakers. Telugu were selected as group I in the age range of 20 – 60 years .30 bilingual subjects i.e. Telugu & English were selected in the age range of 20 – 60 years list of 20 metaphors were selected from two age range groups. A questioner was prepared with list of 20 metaphors and data were collected from the two genders statically analysis was done using analysis of co variance ( ANOVA ) results were shown that there were no significant difference was found between Telugu monolingual and Telugu English bilingual groups. But there was a slight better performance was observed in bilingual Telugu English group. By viewing metaphor as a species of analogy, two generative functions of metaphors can be explained namely, the structural enhancement of target concept, and the lexical extension of basic terms. In study, we have focused on metaphor comprehension and use, and discussed the relationship between monolingual and bilingual. Our hypothesis was 40-60 years bilingual subjects could perform better than 20-40 years monolingual group. Outcome of the study was supporting the hypothesis that performance of metaphor comprehension and use were higher in older adult group than younger adults. Clinical implications: Help language educators to understand specific characteristics of a particular education context and create a classroom that accommodate the polyphony of voices and options. To high light the areas in the learners perceptions of their relationship it can be used in detecting metaphoric uses in subject object verb-noun and adjective –noun relationship Future directions: The languages studied in this paper were Telugu and English only similar experiments with more subjects and on other language should be carried out to test the generality of the results presented. More appropriate methodologies or experimental designs could be used Further research can refine and strengthen some of its aspects, instance through cross linguistic research in other languages. It would be interesting to investigate why this difference is only significant between the monolingual and bilingual groups. In future research it would be worthwhile to incorporate verbal information in the stimuli especially since verbal anchoring may help receivers to appreciate relatively complex metaphors. More research is needed to understand the circumstances under which contextual information is most likely to influence metaphor comprehension. The study can be extended to incorporate the role of preposition in metaphoric uses