Research On The Development Of Children’s Idiom Comprehension

As a phenomenon of nonliteral language in the Chinese,idioms are concise and highly expressive with rich and vivid meanings.However,because the literal and figurative meanings of idioms are usually very different,it is very difficult for the beginners of Chinese to correctly comprehend idioms.Currently available researches on idioms focused mostly on adults,rarely involving children.Study on idiom comprehension mechanisms of children can enrich the research of nonliteral language and deepen cognition about processing mechanisms of nonliteral language.The present study began with investigation on the language features of Chinese idioms and explored the relationships between them,in order to make a clear direction for further studies and to prepare a sufficient and necessary experimental material for the subsequent experiments.In the study,four experiments were administered to test participants in three grade groups,namely the fifth grade,the seventh grade and the eleventh grade.In experimental studies,methods of reaction time are mainly used.The reaction time,correct amount,priming volumes and correct reaction rates were recorded.The features of idioms,context and other independent variables were controlled to explore the factors that influence cognitive comprehension of idioms in children.Experimental results are as follows:(1)Children’s cognitive ability to comprehend the idioms rises as grade increases.For idioms with a high familiarity or a high predictability,the trend that children’s ability to comprehend idioms improves with grades is very clear;for idioms with a low familiarity,children’s ability reaches a certain level in the eleventh grade;for idioms with a low predictability,children showed no significant grade differences in comprehension.(2)The compositionality affects idiom comprehension of children.When possible,children activate the figurative meaning of idioms through extraction.If the extraction fails,they will shift to construction.(3)Context is an important factor affecting children’s understanding of idioms.Figurative context stimulates children’s activation of the figurative meaning of idioms;while literal context hinders it.For idioms with different literality and children of different grades,context has different effects.(4)The activation way in which children comprehend idioms is not a single way.Children’s cognitive processing of idioms can not be explained by a single cognitive model.It requires an integrated theoretical model.These results suggest that children’s cognitive comprehension of idioms accords with Graded Salience Hypothesis but does not comply with the Direct Access Hypothesis.The activation way in which children comprehend idioms is a mixed model of interaction,that is,when no context exists,for idioms with high familiarity and high predictability,children activate the figurative meaning by direct extraction;for idioms with low familiarity and low predictability,high-grade-children extract the figurative meaning,while low-grade-children will not.When possible,they construct;when not,they immediately abandon meaning construction.Context plays a strong role in promoting or inhibiting idiomatic meaning activation.The scale and degree of effects depend on the salience of idioms.Regardless of context,the salient meaning of idioms is always the first to be activated and to be processed;no matter in what context,the literal meaning should be processed first when the idiomatic meaning is not salient;the idiomatic meaning with high salience should be dealt with directly.Therefore,in the figurative context,the figurative meaning has a high salience and is dominantly processed;in the literal context,the figurative meaning of idioms with low literality is salient,and the literal meaning is not salient.When the extraction of figurative meaning fails,the construction of literal meaning then follows.That is,when the language features of idioms and contexts facilitate strongly the activation of meaning,which means high salience,the meaning will be extracted directly;the language features of idioms and contexts inhibit the activation of meaning,which means low salience,then the meaning associated with contexts needs to be constructed.The extent of inhibition of contexts and the language features on meaning construction influence the speed of construction.Based on the results several main conclusions are inferred:(1)Children’s ability of idiom comprehension rises as grade increases;(2)Familiarity,predictability,and compositionality of idioms affect children’s cognitive comprehension of idioms;(3)The way to activate idiomatic meaning is not single.When children understand idioms,they extract firstly the idiomatic meaning.When the extraction fails,construction then follows;(4)Literality of idioms and contexts affect children’s cognitive understanding of idioms.How literality affects children’s cognitive comprehension of idioms is related to contexts;(5)Graded Salience Hypothesis is plausible for children’s cognitive comprehension of idioms.