Whether children shift their interpretations of a metaphor according to the social role of the speaker and the addressee of the sentence or the degree of lexicalization of the metaphor and the child's age was studied using a simple metaphorical sentence and animal terms. The 12 animal terms produced 6 lexicalized and 6 new metaphors. Metaphors were embedded in short stories with: (1) speaker and addressee both children; (2) child speaker and teacher addressee; (3) teacher speaker and child addressee; and (4) speaker and addressee both teachers. The 48 stories were told to 72 children aged 6, 9, and 11 years, and each child was asked what the speaker intended to mean and whether he or she had positive or negative feelings for the addressee. The paraphrases children gave for each metaphor were analyzed, and data were tabulated as to perceptual dimensions. Children aged 9 and 11, but not 6-year-olds, acknowledged the role of the speaker and the addressee, requiring more words to interpret the metaphor presented by a teacher to another teacher than to interpret the metaphor addressed by a child to another child. The meaning of the same metaphor also changed with the child's age. (Contains 7 figures, 9 tables, and 13 references.) (SLD)