Virginie Laval

Idiom comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge in French children

Abstract This study looks at childrens comprehension of idiomatic expressions and metapragmatic knowledge. Idiomatic expressions are expressions where there is a considerable difference between what is said (literal interpretation) and what is meant (idiomatic interpretation). In other words, the meaning of an idiomatic expression depends largely on a convention that relates a given linguistic form to a given meaning. Using this framework, the present study aims to determine the role of contextual characteristics and the linguistic convention (i.e. the arbitrary link between literal meaning and the non-literal meaning) in the comprehension of idiomatic expressions by 6- and 9-year-old children, and by an adult control group. Subjects performed a story completion task (comprehension task), and a task of metapragmatic knowledge to justify their chosen answers. Two features of the stories were varied: the context (idiomatic vs. literal) and the idiom familiarity level (familiar vs. unfamiliar). The main results can be summarized as follows : (1) Regardless of age, the context had a substantial impact on idiom comprehension; (2) Linguistic convention had an effect at 9 but not at 6, and was particularly strong in adults; (3) The role of familiarity also appeared in the 9-year-olds and continued on into adulthood; (4) Metapragmatic knowledge varied with the characteristics of the communicative situation, and the content of these responses changed with age: there was a progressive increase in metapragmatic knowledge of linguistic convention as age increased.

Promises in French children" Comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge

Abstract The present study focuses on childrens comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge of promises. Searle (1969) defines a promise as a commitment on the part of a speaker to accomplish a future action. Two conditions govern the fulfillment of a promise: the preparatory condition (the listener wants the promised action to be accomplished) and a sincerity condition (the speaker intends to accomplish the action). Two experiments were conducted. The first was designed to determine how childrens comprehension of promises and their corresponding metapragmatic knowledge is affected by whether or not the preparatory condition is satisfied, and by the linguistic form of the statement (contains vs. does not contain the verb promise). The second experiment was designed to determine the effects of the linguistic form of the promise statement and of whether or not the sincerity condition is satisfied. Children between the ages of 3 and 10 were asked to complete comic strip stories and justify their responses. The main results showed the following: (1) By the age of 3, both the preparatory condition and the sincerity condition are used by children to comprehend promises, the sincerity condition being mastered earlier than the preparatory condition: (2) The metapragmatic knowledge children express about promises depends on the characteristics of the communication situation (whether or not the preparatory and sincerity conditions are met); (3) Childrens metapragmatic knowledge changes with age: references to execution of the promised action appear between the ages of 3 and 6, whereas remarks concerning the speakers intentions are not observed until age 10; (4) The linguistic form of the statement has little effect on promise comprehension and thus deserves further investigation. The results are interpreted in the light of the functionalist and interactionist theories of development.

Inferring emotions from speech prosody: not so easy at age five.

Previous research has suggested that children do not rely on prosody to infer a speakers emotional state because of biases toward lexical content or situational context. We hypothesized that there are actually no such biases and that young children simply have trouble in using emotional prosody. Sixty children from 5 to 13 years of age had to judge the emotional state of a happy or sad speaker and then to verbally explain their judgment. Lexical content and situational context were devoid of emotional valence. Results showed that prosody alone did not enable the children to infer emotions at age 5, and was still not fully mastered at age 13. Instead, they relied on contextual information despite the fact that this cue had no emotional valence. These results support the hypothesis that prosody is difficult to interpret for young children and that this cue plays only a subordinate role up until adolescence to infer others’ emotions.

Children’s understanding of others’ emotional states Inferences from extralinguistic or paralinguistic cues?

The ability to infer the emotional states of others is central to our everyday interactions. These inferences can be drawn from several different sources of information occurring simultaneously in the communication situation. Based on previous studies revealing that children pay more heed to situational context than to emotional prosody when inferring the emotional states of others, we decided to focus on this issue, broadening the investigation to find out whether the natural combination of emotional prosody and faces (that is, paralinguistic cues) can overcome the dominance of situational context (that is, extralinguistic cues), and if so, at what age? In Experiment 1, children aged 3–9 years played a computer game in which they had to judge the emotional state of a character, based on two sources of information (that is, extralinguistic and paralinguistic) that were either congruent or conflicting. In Condition 1, situational context was compared with emotional prosody; in Condition 2, situational context was compared with emotional prosody combined with emotional faces. In a complementary study (Experiment 2) the same 3-year-olds performed recognition tasks with the three cues presented in isolation. Results highlighted the fundamental role of both cues, as a) situational context dominated prosody in all age groups, but b) the combination of emotional facial expression and prosody overcame this dominance, especially among the youngest and oldest children. We discuss our findings in the light of previous research and theories of both language and emotional development.

Emotional speech comprehension in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

UNLABELLED We examined the understanding of emotional speech by children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We predicted that they would have difficulty understanding emotional speech, not because of an emotional prosody processing impairment but because of problems drawing appropriate inferences, especially in multiple-cue environments. Twenty-six children and adolescents with ASD and 26 typically developing controls performed a computerized task featuring emotional prosody, either embedded in a discrepant context or without any context at all. They must identify the speakers feeling. When the prosody was the sole cue, participants with ASD performed just as well as controls, relying on this cue to infer the speakers intention. When the prosody was embedded in a discrepant context, both ASD and TD participants exhibited a contextual bias and a negativity bias. However ASD participants relied less on the emotional prosody than the controls when it was positive. We discuss these findings with respect to executive function and intermodal processing. LEARNING OUTCOMES After reading this article, the reader should be able to (1) describe the ASD participants pragmatic impairments, (2) explain why ASD participants did not have an emotional prosody processing impairment, and (3) explain why ASD participants had difficulty inferring the speakers intention from emotional prosody in a discrepant situation.

Pragmatique et compréhension du langage chez l'enfant: une étude des formes non littérales avec un paradigme informatisé

L’objectif de la recherche est d’etudier les aspects pragmatiques du langage en posant la question de l’evolution de la comprehension des differentes formes non litterales avec l’âge. Le but est aussi de concevoir une methode de recueil des donnees adaptee aux caracteristiques du langage non litteral. Quatre formes non litterales (demande indirecte (allusion), expression idiomatique, implicature conversationnelle avec inference semantique et implicature conversationnelle avec inference ironique) sont etudiees chez les memes sujets (enfants de 6 a 10 ans et adultes). Le recueil de donnees est realisee avec une tâche de completement d’histoires, qui prend la forme d’un jeu sur ordinateur (le sujet choisit entre deux images). Globalement, l’ordre d’acquisition est le suivant: implicatures avec inference semantique, demandes indirectes, expressions idiomatiques puis implicatures avec inference ironique. Les resultats sont discutes du point de vue des differences entre les groupes et des processus d’acquisition.

Speech Acts in Children: the Example of Promises

Promises are central to human exchanges, especially in adult-child interactions. They consist of a commitment on the part of the speaker to perform a future act, as in ‘je promets de ranger ma chambre’ (‘I promise to clean my room’). For the past ten years, we have been investigating promise comprehension among children from the point of view that language is a communication system and that language competence is the acquisition and use of that system. The emphasis is therefore placed on the functional aspects of language (Bates, 1976; Bruner, 1983; Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan, 1977; Halliday, 1985 ; Ninio and Snow, 1996; Tomasello, 2000). It has been shown in this perspective that interaction formats or routines (prototypical exemplars of social relations) are very important for young children (Bernicot, 1994; Marcos and Bernicot, 1994, 1997).

Contexte et Compréhension des Expressions Idiomatiques: Une Étude Chez des Enfants Francophones Présentant une Dysphasie de Type Phonologique Syntaxique

Cette recherche etudie les aspects pragmatiques de la comprehension chez des enfants francophones presentant une dysphasie de type phonologique syntaxique. Les capacites pragmatiques ne sont pas facilement evaluees par les tests traditionnels, souvent focalises sur l’analyse des aspects formels du langage. A defaut d’instruments etalonnes disponibles en langue francaise, nous avons construit une epreuve informatisee de comprehension des expressions idiomatiques. Ces expressions sont particulierement adaptees pour mesurer le role du contexte dans la comprehension. Le recueil de donnees est realise avec une tâche de completement d’histoires, qui prend la forme d’un jeu sur ordinateur (le participant choisit entre deux images). Les histoires varient en fonction du contexte (idiomatique vs. neutre). Les enfants dysphasiques sont apparies a un groupe d’enfants typiques sur le niveau de comprehension structurale et sur l’âge chronologique. Les resultats montrent que les enfants dysphasiques ont des difficultes ...

How children use emotional prosody: Crossmodal emotional integration?

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from happiness to sadness: 90% happy, 60% happy, 30% happy, neutral, 30% sad, 60% sad, 90% sad) and emotional prosody (i.e., sad vs. happy). Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and a control group of adult students. The children had a different pattern of results from the adults, with only the 9-year-olds exhibiting the crossmodal effect whatever the emotional condition. These results advance our understanding of emotional prosody processing and the efficiency of crossmodal integration in children and are discussed in terms of a developmental trajectory and factors that may modulate the efficiency of this effect in children. (PsycINFO Database Record

“That's really clever!” Ironic hyperbole understanding in children

Hyperbole supports irony comprehension in adults by heightening the contrast between what is said and the actual situation. Because young children do not perceive the communication situation as a whole, but rather give precedence to either the utterance or the context, we predicted that hyperbole would reduce irony comprehension in six-year-olds (n = 40) by overemphasizing what was said. By contrast, ten-year-olds (n = 40) would benefit from hyperbole in the way that adults do, as they would perceive the utterance and context as a whole, highlighted by the speakers ironic intent. Short animated cartoons featuring ironic criticisms were shown to participants. We assessed comprehension of the speakers belief and speakers intent. Results supported our predictions. The development of mentalization during school years and its impact on the development of irony comprehension is discussed.