Metaphors are used continuously in everyday language and they can subtly shift how we perceive and respond to stimuli. Metaphors can also be used in the media to frame complicated topics. For example, describing climate change as a war (“combat excessive energy use”), instead of a race (“get in front of this challenging problem”), can lead to the perception of greater urgency and risk. There have been previous studies that have looked at metaphors surrounding current events but they have primarily relied on manual metaphor identification methods. The purpose of this project is to develop an automated system to identify metaphorical language. The data we are using are New York Times articles about COVID-19 from February through August 2020. We are using the tidyverse and corpus packages in the programming language R to create this pipeline. First, we created a corpus of articles in R, then we created a process to filter and analyze the text. So far, we have identified multiple metaphors used when writing about COVID, such as the “war” metaphor and the “journey” metaphor. The media discusses our “invisible enemy” and our “path forward” during the pandemic. Currently, our pipeline maintains sentences that use our target metaphors while filtering out sentences that contain literal or non-metaphorical language (such as “culture war” or “World War II”). Creating an automated process for analyzing corpora (a collection of texts) for metaphorical language in the COVID articles will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of how the usage of metaphors has changed throughout the pandemic. This pipeline will also allow us to analyze other texts and media for metaphors which will give us greater insight into how culture, language, and perception interact.

Harmful myths are widely circulated about the cognitive effects of bilingualism on children. Studies tend to focus on bilingualism’s effects on overall executive functioning, but looking at preschoolers’ metaphor comprehension allows us to explore a specific, challenging area. Preschoolers struggle to comprehend metaphors, possibly because the mutual exclusivity bias inhibits their understanding that there can be multiple labels for one concept. However, this may not apply to bilingual children, as they were raised with the understanding that there are multiple words for the same meaning. Additionally, examining different types of metaphors and seeing which are harder for children (with fixed factors of age and language exposure), informs us further of this development. In the present study, we aim to understand if early language exposure affects metaphor comprehension and if the metaphor type affects children’s comprehension ability. I run 2.5-4.5 year-old subjects through our study every week by asking them to choose which of two pictures answers my question. Half of my questions are perceptual metaphors, where children can compare visual components to understand the metaphor (e.g. “Which dog is wearing socks?” about two photos of dogs, one with white paws). The other half are abstract metaphors, where children must apply conceptual mapping between two discrete domains (e.g. “Which kid is having a bumpy day” about two photos of kids, one dropping his books and frowning while the other holds his books and smiles). We hypothesize that bilingual children will perform better on the metaphor comprehension tasks because they lack the mutual exclusivity bias. We also predict that perceptual metaphors will be easier because they only require visual comparison. The results of our study can be used to provide clarity on the bilingualism controversy and illuminate challenges and areas of future research in language development.