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Abstract:

A study will be reported of frequencies of different kinds of figurative language used in children’s literature and children’s understanding of these instances of figurative language. For a good interpretation of children’s literature there should be a match between the occurrence of particular kinds of figurative language and children’s level of comprehension. Colston and Kuiper (2002) showed that there is a discrepancy between the materials that are used in figurative language comprehension studies and figurative language used in popular children’s literature. By means of a comparison between a corpus study and a comprehension experiment, we will investigate the match or mismatch between use and comprehension of figurative language. In both studies, we discerned the following types of figurative language: metaphor (Me), personification (Pe), synesthesia (Sy), metonymy (My), saying (Sa), and simile (Si).