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Telling it as it isn't: Children's understanding of figurative language
Author(s) -
Demorest Amy,
Silberstein Lisa,
Gardner Howard,
Winner Ellen
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1983.tb00550.x
Subject(s) - sarcasm , hyperbole , literal and figurative language , explication , irony , psychology , linguistics , metaphor , comprehension , metonymy , context (archaeology) , philosophy , paleontology , biology
The comprehension of five common forms of figurative language, differing both in degree of discrepancy from the truth and in communicative purpose, was examined in six‐, eight‐, and 11‐year‐olds. Children heard a series of brief stories each ending with one of five types of figurative remark (sarcasm, metaphor, understatement, hyperbole, irony) or a literal remark. A straight‐explication task assessed understanding of discrepancy and communicative purpose. A humour‐explication task assessed whether understanding is facilitated by considering the utterance as funny. A memory task assessed recall errors as clues to comprehension. Six‐year‐olds usually recognized neither the discrepancy of the utterances nor the speaker's purpose. Eight‐year‐olds recognized the utterances' discrepancy from the truth. However, they offered few attributions of purpose, and those given were wrong as often as not. Eleven‐year‐olds recognized the discrepancy of the utterances and were also able to identify the communicative purpose. Results of humour‐explication yielded a similar pattern, but interpretations were somewhat more advanced on this task, suggesting that a humour context facilitates comprehension of these figurative utterances. Irony was most difficult to recognize as discrepant, followed in order by hyperbole, understatement, metaphor and sarcasm. With regard to recognizing communicative purpose, irony was least well understood, followed in order by metaphor, understatement, hyperbole and sarcasm. Recall errors in the memory condition supported the explication findings. Results are discussed in terms of the two tasks involved in understanding figurative language: the logical task of recognizing the statement as discrepant from the facts; and the social‐cognitive task of identifying the speaker's communicative purpose.