HOW DO CHILDREN UNDERSTAND STATEMENTS? POSSIBLE INFLUENCES OF TRANSPARENCY AND FAMILIARITY

Abstract

Late speech development –after the age of six– involves the comprehension of figurative statements. However, not all of these structures are learned in the same manner or at the same speed. Frequencies of use of a given statement and its greater opacity or transparency influence the relationship between the literal form and its figurative meaning. Within this framework, this paper aims at theoretically and operatively defining transparent and opaque, familiar and unfamiliar statements and, at the same time, at gauging, by means of interactive software, the performance of 77, 6-10-year-old Chilean students. Results show that differences in scores per age –for both kinds of statements– were significant only if the achievement of 10-year-olds’ was compared with the scores obtained by the younger participants and that acquisition seems to improve significantly at that age. As far as the differences between the comprehension of familiar, transparent utterances and unfamiliar, opaque statements is concerned, each age group showed that they had more difficulties with the latter and, although the gap in the scores obtained by both kinds of utterances narrows in the 10-yearolds, differences were significant in all cases. This would confirm Levorato and Cacciari’s (1992) hypothesis on the emergence of a contextualization strategy that would allow the participants to deal with utterances otherwise.