Hsieh Shelley Ching-Yu, Hsu Chun-Chieh Natalie
Department/Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan, ROC.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2010 Dec;39(6):505-22. doi: 10.1007/s10936-009-9145-z.
This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group). Laval (Journal of Pragmatics 35(2):723-739, 2003) showed that familiarity had an effect on idiom comprehension for French 9-year-olds. However, our finding showed that familiarity was important for 6-year-old Chinese children when a context was not given. Abkarian et al. (Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 35:580-587, 1992) claimed that context has little or no effect on comprehension for children under 6. Our results show that context has an effect on 6-year-old children's understanding of idioms in a different way. Overall, our major research findings are: (1) Familiarity first appeared in responses at age 6. (2) Context played an important role in idiom comprehension and had different effects on different age groups. (3) Linguistic convention starts from age 6 on, and a significant effect took place at the age of 9. (4) Metapragmatic knowledge showed at the age of 6 and could surface even younger. As context and linguistic convention have a substantial effect on the comprehension of idioms, it is necessary to take them into account to explain language functioning and communicative situations.
本研究考察了熟悉度、语境和语言习惯对说普通话儿童习语理解的影响。对三个年龄组（6岁、9岁儿童以及一个成人对照组）的参与者进行了两项实验（一项理解任务，随后是一项结合元语用任务的理解任务）。拉瓦尔（《语用学杂志》35(2):723 - 739, 2003）表明，熟悉度对9岁法国儿童的习语理解有影响。然而，我们的研究发现，在没有给出语境时，熟悉度对6岁中国儿童很重要。阿布卡里安等人（《言语与听觉研究杂志》35:580 - 587, 1992）声称，语境对6岁以下儿童的理解几乎没有影响。我们的结果表明，语境以不同方式影响6岁儿童对习语的理解。总体而言，我们的主要研究发现是：(1) 熟悉度在6岁时首次出现在反应中。(2) 语境在习语理解中起重要作用，且对不同年龄组有不同影响。(3) 语言习惯从6岁开始出现，9岁时产生显著影响。(4) 元语用知识在6岁时出现，甚至可能在更小的时候就显现出来。由于语境和语言习惯对习语理解有实质性影响，因此有必要考虑它们来解释语言功能和交际情境。
