children and non-literal meaning ... again

[Barbara Pearson]

Dear Kristen,
I don't know how I missed your original query in January (except that  
I was traveling at that time)--but your question is exactly the thesis  
of my dissertation (1988!), and a small article in JCL, 1990.  I  
argued that far from being more difficult to understand, metaphor, and  
metonymy more generally, were part of the central core of children's  
meaning-making.  Their prowess in symbolic play, especially using  
generic props that do not literally look like a car or a spoon, in the  
second year of life indicates that they have no trouble understanding  
the use of one thing for another--although it will be many years  
before they can be intentional and explain it metalinguistically.  In  
fact, using language metaphorically might make fewer demands to have  
just one aspect of a "family resemblance" definition that must be  
relevant, compared to the more stringent requirements for literal  
language.  Adults'  familiarity with metonymy in their own discourse  
might make children's earliest denotations easy and unremarkable for  
them to understand.

I hear from people occasionally on this topic, but I haven't pursued  
it. I confess I did not follow up on the interesting summaries other  
Infochildes-ers sent you in January.  I especially do not have a clear  
way to test where on the slope between literal and figurative many  
uses fall, but will be interested if you decide to try.  I probably  
don't have an electronic version of my dissertation to pull out the  
review of the literature (which was quite amusing to read--the  
literature, that is).  The JCL article has a few references like  
Chukovsky and Verbrugge (1979) which may spur your thinking further.

Keep us posted.
Barbara Pearson

On May 28, 2010, at 4:34 AM, Isenthia wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> some time ago I asked for literature on when children start to
> understand non-literal language like metaphor, etc. First of all,
> thanks for the answers you gave on that point.
>
> Today I want to ask a related question, arising from my very limited
> private experience with the kind of language a young child might be
> exposed to.
>
> It seems to me that caretakers do not consciously or deliberatelty
> concentrate on only using expressions literally and that children
> therefore might learn to understand and later to use expressions right
> from the beginning, as it were, with what might be called a non-
> literal meaning. Do you have any comments to make on this?
>
> Maybe an example makes clearer what I have in mind. There is this
> expression in German `dei dei' which roughly means `to sleep'.
> Recently I noticed that my mother, when she was talking to my son (15
> months), used `dei dei' to refer to/explain her putting away a remote
> control he had been playing with. Intuitively, it seems to me that her
> use of `dei dei' is related in meaning to the `to sleep' meaning, but
> deviates from it. The question is whether it is necessarily the case
> that a child in being exposed to these kinds of uses of an expression
> first has to grasp what intuitively seems to be the underlying meaning
> and then derives other uses from that or whether he simply will treat
> the expression initially as if it were polysemous and only in a later
> step connects the meanings in some way with one another.
>
> I hope this makes sense. The point I would like to establish is that
> it is possible to intuitively judge a particular meaning as deviating
> from what, again intuitively, feels like the underlying meaning, when
> in fact in terms of acquisition the intuitively basic meaning was not
> necessarily acquired first or before the meaning that is intuitively
> judged as deviating.
>
> Although this is probably all rather confusing, I'd be very grateful
> for any comments on this idea.
>
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************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate, Depts of Linguistics and   Communication Disorders
c/o 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson

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