# The relationship between theory of mind - Courtenay Frazier Norbury **Abstract:** , that is, they are ferocious and aggressive. Then one must decide in what respect sharks and lawyers are similar, which may involve analogical reasoning skills. Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) also suggest that individuals must enhance the relevant features (ferocious, aggressive) while at the same time suppressing irrelevant knowledge (fins, sharp teeth). Given this example, it is easy to see that metaphor comprehension is not an all or nothing phenomenon and that success will depend in part on the content of a particular metaphor. As Vosniadou (1987) points out, ‘: : : it is quite unlikely that a metaphor will be understood if it compares concepts children or adults know little about’ (p. 870). Evans and Gamble (1988) provide further evidence for the role of semantic knowledge in metaphor comprehension. They compiled a list of all the entities in their metaphor task and asked children to list the salient features of each item. Six weeks later, they asked children to define metaphors containing those entities. They found that children’s comprehension errors occurred when they had provided incomplete or irrelevant information in the salient features list. Gentner (1988) compared different types of metaphorical understanding across wide age ranges.1 Attributive metaphors (‘a cloud is a marshmallow’) were those in which the comparison between two entities was based on shared physical properties. Relational metaphors (‘the moon is a lightbulb’) involved more abstract knowledge **Authors:** [[Courtenay Frazier Norbury*]]