Levorato Maria Chiara, Nesi Barbara, Cacciari Cristina
Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Brain Lang. 2004 Dec;91(3):303-14. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2004.04.002.
The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1998) to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., "break the ice"). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted children's understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in children's comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test.
本研究的目的是调查具有不同阅读理解能力的学龄意大利儿童对习语的理解情况。根据我们的假设，儿童的文本理解技能水平应该能够预测其理解习语含义的能力。事实上，理解习语要求儿童超越简单的逐字理解策略，并将比喻意义融入上下文信息中。在初步阶段，我们使用了一套标准化测试（科尔诺尔迪和科尔波，1998年）来评估二年级和四年级学生理解书面文本的能力。在每个年龄组中都确定了三组：理解能力强、中等和差的学生。然后向儿童呈现一些既有字面意思又有习语意义的常见习语表达（例如，“打破僵局”）。习语被嵌入到短篇小说中：在实验1中，只有习语解释在上下文中是合适的，在实验2中，对习语的字面解读在上下文中也是合理的。两个实验都使用了多项选择题任务：要求儿童从对应于以下三种情况的三个答案中选择一个：（a）习语意义；（b）字面意义；（c）在上下文中合适但与习语表达的习语意义或字面意义无关的解释。两个实验的结果都表明，理解文本的能力确实能够预测儿童在上下文中对习语的理解。为了验证儿童理解技能的可能提高是否会导致比喻性语言理解能力的增强，我们进行了实验3。一组参与了实验1和2的理解能力差的学生在八个月后接受了测试。实验3的结果表明，一般理解能力提高的儿童在习语理解测试中的表现有所提高。
