Acquiring figurative meanings: A study in developmental pragmatics

This project studies how young children cope with figurative language, more specifically metonymy ('Dora [the book about Dora] is on the top shelf') and irony ('What lovely weather we?re having!' [said in a downpour]). Whereas children's competence with metaphor has been debated in the developmental literature for several decades, studies of irony acquisition have been far fewer, and metonymy acquisition has hardly been studied at all. The project will investigate and compare the developmental trajectories of metonymy and irony, with the aim of expanding our knowledge of children's skill with figurative language and their communicative competence more generally. The project also investigates how the acquisition of metonymy and irony interacts with the development of two other communication-relevant abilities which plausibly influence figurative language comprehension: metalinguistic awareness (the ability to reflect on language) and the ability to cope with lies and deception. Traditionally, children's competence with figurative language devices has been studied largely independently of theoretical debates about how these devices are processed by adults. The project aims to establish a tighter link between developmental studies of metonymy and irony and pragmatic theories about the mechanisms underlying them, by putting some key theoretical claims to empirical test. An important part of this project is to develop a psychologically plausible account of our understanding of metonymic expressions, whose predictions are to be experimentally tested. In the first phase of the project, we developed and conducted an experimental study of Norwegian preschoolers' understanding of metonymic utterances using eye-tracking measures. The results show an interesting pattern: While participants' performance on an off-line picture selection task reveals difficulties in children's metonymy comprehension, the on-line data from eye-tracking suggest preferential looking at the correct, target metonymic referents. This suggests that while preschoolers' understanding of metonymic referents may not be developed enough for them to put it into words, they may still have some preliminary, intuitive grasp of metonymic uses in natural language communication. In the second phase of the project, we developed and conducted an experimental study of Norwegian children's understanding of ironical utterances. The participants included 3-9-year-olds children and a control group of adults. The results show that children's understanding or irony emerges fully around age 6, confirming previous findings in the literature. However, performance of 4-5-year-old children improved when the ironical utterance was paired with a "parodic" intonation, clearly signaling that the utterance was not meant to be interpreted literally. This suggests that some aspects crucial to irony understanding develops before children have reached full mastery of the phenomenon. Further, the eye-tracking data show that children as young as 3 years do not process ironical utterances as though they were literal, positive utterances (e.g., "Nice weather today!"),suggesting that they are sensitive to context and/or tone of voice in the interpretation process. We have completed the data collection for a set of experiments that tests the association between children's irony understanding and the development of so-called "epistemic vigilance", that is, the ability to take the speaker's reliability and trustworthiness into account in assessing utterance content, which is an important aspect of irony understanding. We are in the final stages of analysing and publishing the findings from this study of the relation between children's irony understanding and epistemic vigilance. An updated theoretical account of metonymy understanding in children and adults, which takes into account the findings of the current project, will be published in 2021.

Forskningen som har vært utført på prosjektet har gitt opphav til nytt tverrfaglig samarbeid for prosjektleder, der andre forskere har benyttet seg av det metodiske rammeverket utviklet av prosjektet. I tillegg har prosjektets resultater gitt opphav til nye hypoteser på andre områder, blant annet forskning på barn med autismespekterforstyrrelser. Prosjektet og de oppnådde resultatene vært helt sentrale for prosjektleders utforming av ERC StG-prosjektet DEVCOM (2020-2025), som fikk bevilgning i 2019, og forskerprosjektet "Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development" (FINNUT-bevilgning 2020-2024). Disse prosjektene presenterer en ny, overordnet hypotese for utviklingen av barns ferdigheter med ikke-bokstavelig språkbruk. Prosjektene forventes å bidra med nye viktige innsikter til vår forståelse av barns pragmatiske utvikling, kunnskap som har viktige anvendte implikasjoner for innenfor områder som blant annet språkutvikling, utdanning og kommunikasjon.

This project addresses a key issue in pragmatic development (i.e. development of the ability to use and understand language appropriately in context): how do young children cope with figurative language? Whereas children's competence with metaphor has been debated in the developmental literature for several decades, studies of irony acquisition have been far fewer, and metonymy acquisition has hardly been studied at all. Our main goal is to investigate and compare the developmental trajectories of metonymy and irony, and thus to expand our knowledge of children's skill with figurative language and their overall pragmatic ability more generally. A puzzling feature of children's pragmatic development is the contrast between the ease with which they tackle pragmatically complex tasks such as word learning, and the difficulty they have with 'Gricean' pragmatic inferences, which involve going beyond literal linguistic meanings to obtain the meaning intended by the speaker, as in cases of figurative language. This has led some researchers to suggest that the development of figurative language competence may have more to do with the acquisition of other cognitive skills than development of pragmatic abilities per se; however, such connections remain largely unexplored. We will investigate how the acquisition of metonymy and irony interacts with the development of two other communication-relevant abilities which plausibly influence figurative language comprehension: metalinguistic awareness and the ability to cope with lies and deception. Traditionally, children's competence with figurative language devices has been studied largely independently of theoretical debates about how these devices are processed by adults. We aim to establish a tighter link between developmental studies of metonymy and irony and pragmatic theories about the mechanisms underlying them, by putting some key theoretical claims to empirical test.