“Towers Can’t Wear Clothes”: How Literal and Reality Biases Affect Children’s Understanding of Metaphors

Children’s early conceptual development appears marked by robust preferences for both literal interpretations and realistic outcomes. Traditionally studied separately, these preferences clash in metaphor comprehension as literal interpretations can often be unrealistic. We explored how 4- to 8-year-old children navigated these competing preferences in a metaphor comprehension task. By doing this, we also aimed to challenge the fantastical thinking account, which suggests that children’s literalist interpretations of metaphorical statements stem from a tolerance for fantastical outcomes. In Experiment 1, we found that children, like adults, are sensitive to the reality status of literal versus metaphorical referents. In Experiment 2, children successfully derived metaphorical meanings when no competing literal options were present. However, the presence of literal interpretations significantly impacted performance. Although these interpretations violated the real-world context, only adults fully disregarded the fantastical literal options in favor of the realistic metaphorical ones. These findings suggest that children’s literalist responses result more from the influence of literal meanings than from an inability to derive metaphorical interpretations from prior context or a lack of sensitivity to real-world plausibility.