Rumelhart demonstrates this with a description of how children naturally shift between literal and figurative language. When a child can’t find an exact word or phrase to express what they want to say, they often use an alternative figurative phrase instead; for example, the child who describes a “nasty smell in her tummy”. The child uses a figurative term purely because their vocabulary does not yet contain sufficient words to express literally everything they want to say. But this also shows that the language processes involved in figurative speech are the same as for literal speech. A child doesn’t stop and think “I’ll use a metaphor because I don’t know the right word”, it’s a natural process, and Rumelhart surmises that the process
