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Dear Kristen,<br><br>
My early work was on the development of representational play during the
second year of life. When children can convey non-literal meaning through
play, they are engaging in a metaphor of action. If you look closely at
how their uses of a given word extend across events, you will see that a
non-literal aspect is seen there as well. Words that refer to dynamic
aspects of events are particularly salient. While one can say there is
something literally similar across uses, the extension from one situation
to the next does involve analogy.<br><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1>Examples of
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1><i>open:<br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1>Shanti—Gesturing at
toy milk bottle she wants mother to open<br>
Prior to opening the jack-in-the-box<br>
Taking bottle after mother opens it<br>
Janis—Pushing on cover of workbench, trying to open it<br>
Trying to open book<br>
Mira—Trying to get object out of bottle that is already opened<br><br>
or some for "allgone":<br><br>
Janis—Showing mother an empty juice cup<br>
Looking in empty bucket when toys have been removed<br>
Setting a book down when finished with it<br>
Meri—Looking in empty bottle after removing objects<br>
Holding up blanket; answering mother’s question, “What happened<br>
to the baby?”<br>
Mira—Looking in empty cup;her juice gone.<br>
Shanti—Waving her empty juice glass in the air<br>
After dumping an object from the large bottle<br>
Searching for a doll<br>
Looking for more objects to put in the bottle after the appropriate<br>
ones have been put in<br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1><i>bye-bye (Used
as "allgone" by some.)<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1>Janis—Dropping lid
in pot<br>
Before and while closing the lid on the jack-in-the-box<br>
Putting objects in the bottle<br>
Covering mother’s face with her hair<br><br>
<br>
</font>The bye-bye use is reminiscent of your example re: sleep. I
believe the children do their extending by analogy in general
because few situations involving extension of meaning are exactly
the same as one another. Because there is some sense of similarity across
uses, children's early words are usually described as naming
"categories". However, it may be that they are simply reminded
of prior uses of words in new situations by analogical extension. The
similarities lead us to define these as categories. If the child's use is
too far off, we term it an "over-extension". The fact that they
engage in levels of representational play requiring analogical processes
suggests that these processes are available for language as
well.<br><br>
Lorraine<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
At 04:34 AM 5/28/2010, wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Dear All,<br><br>
some time ago I asked for literature on when children start to<br>
understand non-literal language like metaphor, etc. First of all,<br>
thanks for the answers you gave on that point.<br><br>
Today I want to ask a related question, arising from my very limited<br>
private experience with the kind of language a young child might be<br>
exposed to.<br><br>
It seems to me that caretakers do not consciously or deliberatelty<br>
concentrate on only using expressions literally and that children<br>
therefore might learn to understand and later to use expressions
right<br>
from the beginning, as it were, with what might be called a non-<br>
literal meaning. Do you have any comments to make on this?<br><br>
Maybe an example makes clearer what I have in mind. There is this<br>
expression in German `dei dei' which roughly means `to sleep'.<br>
Recently I noticed that my mother, when she was talking to my son
(15<br>
months), used `dei dei' to refer to/explain her putting away a
remote<br>
control he had been playing with. Intuitively, it seems to me that
her<br>
use of `dei dei' is related in meaning to the `to sleep' meaning,
but<br>
deviates from it. The question is whether it is necessarily the case<br>
that a child in being exposed to these kinds of uses of an
expression<br>
first has to grasp what intuitively seems to be the underlying
meaning<br>
and then derives other uses from that or whether he simply will
treat<br>
the expression initially as if it were polysemous and only in a
later<br>
step connects the meanings in some way with one another.<br><br>
I hope this makes sense. The point I would like to establish is that<br>
it is possible to intuitively judge a particular meaning as
deviating<br>
from what, again intuitively, feels like the underlying meaning,
when<br>
in fact in terms of acquisition the intuitively basic meaning was
not<br>
necessarily acquired first or before the meaning that is intuitively<br>
judged as deviating.<br><br>
Although this is probably all rather confusing, I'd be very grateful<br>
for any comments on this idea.<br><br>
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