Processing Skills and Children's Idiom Comprehension the Development of Idiom Comprehension: an Investigation of Semantic and Contextual Processing Skills

processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 2 Abstract Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared to adults (Experiment One) and 11-to 12-year-olds (Experiment Two). The results broadly support the Global Elaboration Model of figurative competence (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) with a notable exception: even the youngest children were able to use semantic analysis to derive the meanings of transparent idioms, as well as being sensitive to meaning in context. The findings show that young children process language at both the small-grained phrasal-level as well as the discourse-level to establish figurative meaning and demonstrate that the language processing skills that aid idiom comprehension, as well as idiom knowledge itself, are still not fully developed in 11-to 12-year-olds. processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 3 The development of idiom comprehension: an investigation of semantic and contextual processing skills An idiom is a form of figurative language that can (usually) have both a literal and a figurative meaning, depending on the context. For example, the sentence 'Chris spilled the beans' might refer to someone tipping out the contents of a jar of beans (literal) or revealing a secret (figurative). Comprehension of figurative language, such as idioms, can cause particular contribution of two language processing skills to young children's understanding and acquisition of the meanings of idiomatic phrases: semantic analysis and inference from context. Our aim was to determine how these different language processes contribute to developmental differences in idiom comprehension. A unique feature of this work is our use of novel idioms. Previous research has always used idioms that occur in the speakers' language, for which participants may have full or partial knowledge. Our use of novel idioms enabled us to assess idiom processing without the confound of prior knowledge, which may obviously be related to age. Semantic analysis of an idiomatic phrase involves retrieving alternate meanings of key words and computing a non-literal meaning of the phrase. Transparent idioms (also referred to as decomposable or semantically analysable) have a clear overlap between the literal and figurative meanings of the phrase. For example the term 'to speak your mind' can be analysed to derive its meaning: 'to express your feelings or opinions …