Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:23:13.955Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The moustache sits down first”: on the acquisition of metonymy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2016

INGRID L. FALKUM ,
MARTA RECASENS  and
EVE V. CLARK
INGRID L. FALKUM*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo
MARTA RECASENS
Affiliation:
Stanford University
EVE V. CLARK
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Address for correspondence: Ingrid L. Falkum, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, PO Box 1020 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates preschoolers’ ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9–5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animates metonymically on the basis of a salient property. Although children were outperformed by adults, even three-year-olds could understand and produce metonyms in certain circumstances. Our results suggest that young children may find it easier to produce a metonym than a more elaborate referential description in certain contexts, and that metonymy may serve as a useful strategy in referring to entities that lack a conventional label. However, metonymy comprehension appeared to decrease with age, with older children tending to choose literal interpretations of some metonyms. This could be a result of growing metalinguistic awareness, which leads children to overemphasize literal meanings.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 87 - 119
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Council of Norway (project no. 205513), awarded to the first author, and by a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship from Generalitat de Catalunya (2010 BP-A 00149), awarded to the second author. We would like to thank the children and staff (especially Chia-wa Yeh and Jennifer Winters) at Bing Nursery School, Stanford; this research would not have been possible without them. We thank Megan O'Neil and Marisa Casillas for all help with the data collection. Also special thanks to Petter Laake and Ewart Thomas for statistical advice, and to Robyn Carston, Eduard Hovy, Georg Kjøll, Brian MacWhinney, Agustín Vicente, and in particular Deirdre Wilson for insightful comments and discussion on earlier drafts. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments on previous drafts substantially improved the paper. Marta Recasens is currently at Google Inc.

References

REFERENCES

Acredolo, L. & Goodwyn, S. (1988). Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. Child Development 59, 450–66.Google Scholar
Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M. & Tomasello, M. (1996). The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development 67, 635–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apresjan, J. D. (1974). Regular polysemy. Linguistics 14(2), 5–32.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Snider, N. (2010). More than words: frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language 62(1), 67–82.Google Scholar
Asch, S. & Nerlove, H. (1960). The development of double function terms in children: an exploratory investigation. In Kaplan, B. & Wapner, S. (eds), Perspectives in psychological theory: essays in honor of Heinz Werner, 47–60. New York: International Universities Press.Google Scholar
Billow, R. M. (1975). A cognitive developmental study of metaphor comprehension. Developmental Psychology 11(4), 415–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, P. (2002). Mindreading, communication and the learning of names for things. Mind & Language 1/2, 37–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1982). Starting to talk worse: clues to language acquisition from children's late speech errors. In Stavy, R. & Strauss, S. (eds), U-shaped behavioural growth, 101–45. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bushnell, E. W. & Maratsos, M. P. (1984). ‘Spooning’ and ‘basketing’: children's dealing with accidental gaps in the lexicon. Child Development 55, 893–902.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1982). The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art, 390–425. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1997). Conceptual perspective and lexical choice in acquisition. Cognition 64, 1–37.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Clark, H. H. (1979). When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55(4), 767–811.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V., Gelman, S. A. & Lane, N. M. (1985). Compound nouns and category structure in young children. Child Development 56(1), 84–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copestake, A. & Briscoe, T. (1995). Semi-productive polysemy and sense extension. Journal of Semantics 12(1), 15–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crozier, W. R. & Dimmock, P. S. (1999). Name-calling and nicknames in a sample of primary school children. British Journal of Educational Psychology 69(4), 505–16.Google Scholar
Deamer, F. (2013). An investigation into the processes and mechanisms underlying the comprehension of metaphor and hyperbole. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University College London.Google Scholar
Doherty, M. & Perner, J. (1998). Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: Just two words for the same thing? Cognitive Development 13(3), 279–305.Google Scholar
Ervin, S. (1964). Imitation and structural change in children's language. In Lenneberg, E. H. (ed.), New directions in the study of language, 163–89. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fleiss, J. L. (1971). Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychological Bulletin 76(5), 378–82.Google Scholar
Frisson, S. & Pickering, M. J. (2007). The processing of familiar and novel senses of a word: why reading Dickens is easy but reading Needham can be hard. Language and Cognitive Processes 22(4), 595–613.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gombert, J. E. (1992). Metalinguistic development. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Gottfried, G. M. (1997). Using metaphors as modifiers: children's production of metaphoric compounds. Journal of Child Language 24, 567–601.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huttenlocher, J. & Smiley, P. (1987). Early word meanings: the case of object names. Cognitive Psychology 19, 63–89.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 434–46.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond modularity: a developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (1986). Conceptual domains and the acquisition of metaphor. Cognitive Development 1, 73–96.Google Scholar
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Konieczna, E. & Kleparski, G. A. (2006). Motivation in language: the case of metonymically motivated innovative nouns in children's speech. Odisea 7, 103–17.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Landis, J. R. & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33, 159–74.Google Scholar
Levorato, M. C. & Cacciari, C. (2002). The creation of new figurative expressions: psycholinguistic evidence in Italian children, adolescents and adults. Journal of Child Language 29, 127–50.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Mittelberg, I. (2006). Metaphor and metonymy in language and gesture: discourse evidence for multimodal models of grammar. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Nerlich, B. & Clarke, D. D. (2001). Serial metonymy: a study of reference-based polysemisation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2(2), 245–72.Google Scholar
Nerlich, B., Clarke, D. D. & Todd, Z. (1999). ‘Mummy, I like being a sandwich.’ Metonymy in language acquisition. In Panther, K. & Radden, G. (eds), Metonymy in language and thought, 361–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Noveck, I. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78, 165–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nunberg, G. (1979). The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy 3(2), 143–84.Google Scholar
Özçalışkan, Ş. (2005). On learning how to draw the distinction between physical and metaphorical motion: Is metaphor an early emerging cognitive and linguistic capacity? Journal of Child Language 32, 291–318.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A. (1996). On metonymy. Lingua 99, 169–95.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A. & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics–pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, 253–82.Google Scholar
Pouscolous, N. (2011). Metaphor: For adults only? Belgian Journal of Linguistics 25, 51–79.Google Scholar
Rabagliati, H., Marcus, G. F. & Pylkkänen, L. (2010). Shifting senses in lexical semantic development. Cognition 117, 17–37.Google Scholar
Radden, G. & Kövecses, Z. (1999). Towards a theory of metonymy. In Panther, K.-U. & Radden, G. (eds), Metonymy in language and thought, 17–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.Google Scholar
Rosch, E., Mervis, C., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M. & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8, 382–439.Google Scholar
Rundblad, G. & Annaz, D. (2010). Development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension: receptive vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 28, 547–63.Google Scholar
Schönefeld, D. (2005). Zero-derivation – functional change – metonymy. In Bauer, L. & Valera, S. (eds), Approaches to conversion/zero-derivation, 125–55. Münster: Waxmann Verlag.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In Khalfa, J. (ed.), What is intelligence? 179–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986/1995). Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stites, L. & Özçalışkan, Ş. (2013). Developmental changes in children's comprehension and explanation of spatial metaphors for time. Journal of Child Language 40, 1123–37.Google Scholar
Tunmer, W. E., Pratt, C. & Herriman, M. L. (eds) (1984). Metalinguistic awareness in children. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Van Herwegen, J., Dimitriou, D. & Rundblad, G. (2013). Development of novel metaphor and metonymy comprehension in typically developing children and Williams syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities 34(4), 1300–11.Google Scholar
Vosniadou, S. (1987). Children and metaphors. Child Development 58(3), 870–85.Google Scholar
Vosniadou, S. & Orthony, A. (1983). The emergence of the literal–metaphorical–anomalous distinction in young children. Child Development 54, 154–61.Google Scholar
Warren, B. (2006). Referential metonymy. Lund: Publications of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. & Carston, R. (2007). A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In Burton-Roberts, N. (ed.), Pragmatics, 230–59. London: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. & Falkum, I. L. (2014). Metonymy and relevance. Paper presented at the Workshop on Relevance, Literariness and Style, Middlesex University, London.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winner, E. (1988/1997). The point of words: children's understanding of metaphor and irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Winner, E., Engel, M. & Gardner, H. (1980). Misunderstanding metaphor: What's the problem. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 30, 22–32.Google Scholar
Winner, E., Rosenstiel, A. K. & Gardner, H. (1976). The development of metaphoric understanding. Developmental Psychology 12(4), 289–97.Google Scholar