Idiom comprehension in child language

[Mehmet ÖZCAN]

Dear Hüseyin,

(I answer all of the questions you posed me personally here thinking that 
other colleagues might want to comment on them as well)

·         (Concerning your question about the location of data collection) The 
location you are going to collect the data depends totally on the location 
of the study carried out by Gokmen and her student (as you mentioned) to 
find out the words determined as “prototype words”; watermelon which is 
found to be 8th item on the list in Ankara may be the first or third in 
Urfa or Adana; or orange the first in Mediterranean Region, if you are 
going to construct your  sentences depending on their list. In a nutshell, 
prototypicality is idiosyncratic and a common sense of prototypicality 
occurs when the personal senses of prototypicalities overlap to the 
sufficient extent. 

·         One problem with the hypothesis: As far as I understood, you 
assume that idiomatic expressions are processed within the framework of 
compositionality theory: the meaning of a phrase or a larger linguistic 
unit can be grasped by knowing the meaning/function of each element the 
whole unit contains. This may be the case in most cases, especially when it 
comes to accessing the literal meaning. As you know, Compositionality 
Theory has been criticized for not being able to explain the processing of 
pragmatics in the expressions. Thus, you may revise your assumptions.

·         Another thing to concentrate on may be the prototypicality of the 
idiomatic expression (among other idiomatic expressions) itself rather than 
the expressions’ containing prototypical elements. You know, *some birds 
are birder than other birds*. Some idiomatic expressions may have some 
prototypical features structurally or regarding other qualities.

·         Integrating infant directed speech to this study would be too 
much to my understanding. You will have to carry out longitudinal 
observations to measure the exposition of a child to idiomatic expressions 
or the words in the list determined by the previous studies. 

I am looking forward to hearing about the findings of your demanding study. 
Good luck in all ways.



On Tuesday, May 20, 2014 12:56:54 AM UTC+3, huy... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> First of all, I would like to express my excitement about posting my first 
> question in this group (Of course, after reading the older posts).
>
> I have been reading about Prototype Theory of Eleanor Rosch, which is the 
> point of departure for my M.A thesis, within the frame of child language 
> development. Then I suddenly found myself trying to design steps for (an) 
> experiment(s) in idiom comprehension. I am partly aware of the literature 
> in figurative language processing (thanks to the comprehensive chapter by 
> Gibbs and Colston in 
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780123693747). So my questions 
> are as follows:
>
>    - What is the direction of research in idiom comprehension in child 
>    language?
>    - Could you suggest me some seminal works in idiom comprehension, or 
>    more generally figurative language?
>    - Is there anyone to help me revise my experimental design?
>    - What kind of an effect could prototypicality of concepts in idioms 
>    have on children's comprehension? (Feel free to share your criticism or 
>    advice, if you prefer to look at this research question from another 
>    perspective.)
>    - A third research field having just popped into my mind is child 
>    directed speech. In what way can I integrate it into my research?
>
> Thanks,
> Huseyin
>

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