Idiom comprehension in child language

Tue May 20 02:45:38 UTC 2014

Dear Huseyin,

Brian's reference to Chukovsky's really great little book jarred my memory.  If you give me your snail mail address, I can send an old-fashioned reprint from an article from my dissertation on "The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children" with many more names, at least pre-1990 : ) (Gardner, Piaget, and Kuczaj, but also Winner, Ortony, Billow, Reyna, Vosniadou, a 1981 dissertation from Ohio State with several preschool examples, and others).  Or you can just download it from Journal of Child Language, 1990, vol. 17, pp. 184-203.

(Why do I still have those reprints??!)

Cheers,

Barbara Pearson
************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Co-director, Language Acquisition Research Center
c/o Linguistics, 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

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

On May 19, 2014, at 10:14 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

Dear Huseyin,
     This is a great topic and I am not really the best person to address the question, but let me throw in my two cents worth.  One early and fascinating study of this is "From Two to Five" by Korney Chukovsky.  Check out the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korney_Chukovsky.  Bruno Estigarribia gathered some observations from info-childes related to these issues a few months back.
    Years ago, Stan Kuczaj thought and wrote a fair amount on this topic and Howard Gardner was interested in it too, but Chukovsky gives more detail.  You can find related bits and pieces on this is various baby diaries and accounts, including even Piaget and Susan Isaacs.
     Occasionally, I see experimental work on the topic.  A search of scholar.google.com<http://scholar.google.com/> for "children's idiom comprehension" brings up papers by people such as Dan Kempler, Cristina Cacciari, and Brian Ackerman.  Not a lot of work, but certainly enough to get you started.
     I think that your emphasis on prototypicality is going in the right direction, but to really understand this you need a lot of backup from corpus work.  I am more and more convinced that metaphors and idioms cluster into semantic fields that tend to pop out from very large corpora.  However, children have only been exposed to the tip of this iceberg, so the relevant prototypes and semantic fields are still rather unstable.

--Brian MacWhinney
On May 19, 2014, at 5:56 PM, huysal9 at gmail.com<mailto:huysal9 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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