We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Children's understanding of idioms and theory of mind development.
- Authors
Caillies, Stéphanie; Le Sourn‐Bissaoui, Sandrine
- Abstract
The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis according to which theory of mind competence was a prerequisite to ambiguous idioms understanding. We hypothesized that the child needs to understand that the literal interpretation could be a false world representation, a false belief, and that the speaker's intention is to mean something else, to correctly process idiomatic expressions. Two kinds of ambiguous idioms were of interest: decomposable and nondecomposable expressions ( Titone & Connine, 1999 ). An experiment was designed to assess the figurative developmental changes that occur with theory of mind competence. Five-, 6- and 7-year-old children performed five theory of mind tasks (an appearance–reality task, three false-belief tasks and a second-order false-belief task) and listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions inserted in context, before performing a multiple choice task. Results indicated that only nondecomposable idiomatic expression was predicted from the theory of mind scores, and particularly from the second-order competences. Results are discussed with respect to theory of mind and verbal competences.
- Subjects
CHILDREN'S language; PHILOSOPHY of mind in children; IDIOMS; CHILD development; COMPREHENSION; CHILD psychology
- Publication
Developmental Science, 2008, Vol 11, Issue 5, p703
- ISSN
1363-755X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00720.x