Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

Purpose: The aim of this review is to illuminate the connection between inferential skills and spoken language idiom comprehension (SLIC) with a focus on autism. Idioms are frequently occurring figurative expressions, such as feeling blue, on cloud nine, and all tied up, that have literal and nonliteral meanings. Method: In this review article, an…

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of…

Metaphor development in conjunction with verbal intelligence and linguistic competence in middle childhood and at the transition to early adolescence was investigated. 298 individuals between seven and ten years (chronological age) who attended grades two-four (mental age) were tested for metaphor processing by the Metaphoric Triads Task, for…

The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances…

Conceptual combinations may be interpreted by 3 main strategies: by attributing a feature of the modifying (head) noun into the modified noun (property interpretation); by establishing a relation between the 2 concepts (relational interpretation); or by combining properties of both nouns into a concept with new identity (hybridization). There…

This study investigated the development of novel metaphor and metonymy comprehension in both typically developing (TD) children and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Thirty-one TD children between the ages of 3;09 and 17;01 and thirty-four individuals with WS between the ages of 7;01 and 44 years old were administered a newly developed task…

Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good…

The capacity to appreciate and produce metaphoric language is thought to develop at adolescence. Yet metaphors are frequently noted in the speech of preschool children. To resolve this apparent contradiction, a test probing metaphoric capacity was devised. Matched groups of subjects ranging in age from 3 1/2 to 19 were required to indicate…

Forty students aged 9-18 were asked to explain the meanings of lexically ambiguous advertisements from magazines, newspapers, and brochures. Older subjects explained the meanings correctly more frequently than younger subjects. The psychological meanings of the ads were found to be more difficult to explain than the physical meanings. (Author/JDD)

A study examined the differences in the appreciation of language ambiguity as represented in the word play of children aged 6 through 11 years. In six weekly play sessions, students were read stories containing many lexical ambiguities and pictures and were invited to verbalize and to draw similar ambiguities. Criteria necessary to the…

Happe (1993) proposed that theory of mind (ToM) understanding was necessary for comprehension of metaphorical expressions. The current study investigated the role of both ToM and language ability in metaphor understanding. Ninety-four children aged 8-15 years with communication impairments were grouped according to language ability and autistic…