The aim of the current study is to examine: (1)12-14-year-old children can understand the conventional visual metaphor better or the conventional verbal metaphor; semantic knowledge & analogical thinking which accounts for it.(2) 12-14-year-old children can understand the novel visual metaphor better or the novel verbal metaphor; semantic knowledge & analogical thinking which accounts for it. (3) 12-14-year-old children can interpret the verbal conventional metaphor better or the verbal novel metaphor; semantic knowledge & analogical thinking which accounts for it. (4) 12-14-year-old children can interpret the visual conventional metaphor better or the visual novel metaphor; semantic knowledge & analogical thinking which accounts for it. 

Different approaches attempt to explain the processes involved in understanding

novel metaphors (e.g., “tear pearls”) versus conventional metaphors (e.g., “sweet dreams”). The Structure Mapping model ( Gentner and Wolff, 1997) proposes that metaphors act to set up correspondences between conceptual structures of the target and base concepts. The model proposes an initial stage of structural alignment between concepts, followed by inference importations from one concept to the other. According to the “graded salience hypothesis” (Giora1997), the order meanings of phrases are processed is done gradually. Understanding new metaphors is different from understanding worn-out (conventional) metaphors. Understanding new metaphors is based on a process in which the more accessible (literal) meaning is processed first and the less accessible meaning, the metaphoric meaning, is processed later on, regarding new metaphors. On the other hand, in familiar metaphors, where the verbal and metaphoric interpretations are equally accessible, both meanings are