Idiom comprehension in child language

[Tom Roeper]

Hi folks--

just to mention a couple of things--an example I just heard:
     "I know a shortcut"
     "well, I know a shorter cut"
and cases like "you're a slowpoke, but I'm a fastpoke".

I wrote a paper on idioms with Zvi Penner that appears
in the volume for Jüregen Weisenborn by Mouton--it
relates to complex sentences.

  Work by Ellen Winner on Metaphor seems pertinent
to children's comprehension of them.  A child with
a stomache who said"
       "there's a fireengine in my stomach"
or a child with a stuffed nose who said:
       "there's paint in my nose".

Deviations from compositionality can still be logically
motivated.

Tom Roeper


On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 5:09 AM, Mehmet ÖZCAN <mehozcan20 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Tom Roeper
Dept of Lingiustics
UMass South College
Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
413 256 0390

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