The ability to comprehend non-literal language is still developing throughout the school years. This study analysed the responses of a large stratified sample of 6- to 11-year-old children to a forced-choice picture selection task testing a common type of idiomatic expression: verb+particle constructions such as `look up' and `call off'. Effects for frequency were found in children's comprehension of particular verb+particle constructions. Furthermore, distractor analysis revealed that children may not have been applying simple decompositional semantic strategies in their attempts to comprehend unfamiliar verbs. It seemed that syntactic features of the verbs were also taken into account, and that children made use of contextual information only in certain circumstances. It is argued that children's choices of distractors indicated that they employed a holistic rather than an analytic approach to comprehension of unfamiliar particle verbs.
Abkarian, G.G., Jones, A. & West, G. (1992). Young children's idiom comprehension: Trying to get the picture. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35(3), 580—587.
2.
Abrahamsen, E.P. & Burke-Williams, D. (2004). Comprehension of idioms by children with learning disabilities: Metaphoric transparency and syntactic frozenness. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33(3), 203—215.
3.
Adams, C., Cooke, R., Crutchley, A., Hesketh, A. & Reeves, D. (2001). Assessment of comprehension and expression 6—11 . Windsor: NFER-Nelson.
4.
Bolinger, D. (1971). The phrasal verb in English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5.
Bowerman, M. (1986). First steps in acquiring conditionals. In E. C. Traugott, A. Ter Meulen, J. S. Reilly & C. A. Ferguson (Eds), On Conditionals (pp. 285—307). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6.
Cain, K., Oakhill, J. & Lemmon, K. (2005). The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90(1), 65—87.
7.
Celce-Murcia, M. & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/ EFL teacher's course (2nd ed.). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
8.
Clark, E. (1995). Later lexical development and word formation. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds), The handbook of child language (pp. 393—412). Oxford: Blackwell.
9.
Crutchley, A. (2004). `If she had of shutted the cage, the rabbit wouldn't escape': Past counterfactuals elicited from 6- to 11-year-old children. First Language, 24(2), 209—240.
10.
Dixon, R.W.W. (1982). The grammar of phrasal verbs. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2(1), 1—42.
11.
Gibbs, R.W. (1987). Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms. Journal of Child Language, 14, 569—586.
12.
Gibbs, R.W. (1991). Semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 34, 613—620.
13.
Hudson, J.A. & Slackman, E.A. (1990). Children's use of scripts in inferential text processing. Discourse Processes, 13(4), 375—385.
14.
Kerbel, D. & Grunwell, P. (1997). Idioms in the classroom: An investigation of language unit and mainstream teachers' use of idioms. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 13(2), 113—124.
15.
Kerbel, D. & Grunwell, P. (1998a). A study of idiom comprehension in children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties. Part 1: Task effects on the assessment of idiom comprehension in children. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 33(1), 1—22.
16.
Kerbel, D. & Grunwell, P. (1998b). A study of idiom comprehension in children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties, Part II: Between-groups results and discussion . International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders , 33(1), 23—44.
17.
Kerbel, D., Grunwell, P. & Grundy, K. (1996). A play-based methodology for assessing idiom comprehension in children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties. European Journal of Disorders of Communication, 31(1), 65—75.
18.
Levorato, M.C. & Cacciari, C. (1992). Children's comprehension and production of idioms: The role of context and familiarity. Journal of Child Language , 19, 415—433.
19.
Levorato, M.C. & Cacciari, C. (1995). The effects of different tasks on the comprehension and production of idioms in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 261—283.
20.
Levorato, M.C. & Cacciari, C. (1997). Lo sviluppo della competenza linguistica figurata: dalla letteralita al metalinguaggio [The development of figurative linguistic competence: From literalness to metalanguage]. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 24(2), 399—422.
21.
Levorato, M.C. & Cacciari, C. (1999). Idiom comprehension in children: Are the effects of semantic analysability and context separable? The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 11(1), 51—66.
22.
Levorato, M.C., Nesi, B. & Cacciari, C. (2004). Reading comprehension and understanding idiomatic expressions: A developmental study. Brain and Language, 91(3), 303—314.
23.
Lindner, S.J. (1983). A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb particle constructions with “out” and “up”. PhD dissertation. Reprinted: Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
24.
Littlefield, H.A. (2006). Syntax and acquisition in the prepositional domain; evidence from English for fine-grained syntactic categories. Unpublished PhD dissertation, BostonState University .
25.
MacMillanPhrasal Verbs Plus ( 2005). Oxford: MacMillan.
26.
McIntyre, A. (1998). Particle verbs and argument structure. Unpublished manuscript, University of Leipzig. Available on: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/%7Eangling/mcintyre/part.argstr.pdf
27.
McIntyre, A. (2002). Introduction. In N . Dehé, R. M. Jackendoff, A. & S. Urban (Eds), Verbparticle explorations (pp. 1—20). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
28.
Morgan, P. (1997). Figuring out figure out: Metaphor and the semantics of the English verb-particle construction. Cognitive Linguistics , 8(4), 327—357.
29.
Nippold, M.A. (1985). Comprehension of figurative language in youth . Topics in Language Disorders, 5, 1—20.
30.
Nippold, M.A. (1998). Later language development: The school-age and adolescent years. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed .
31.
Nippold, M.A., Moran, C. & Schwartz, I.E. (2001). Idiom understanding in preadolescents: Synergy in action. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 10, 169—179.
32.
Nippold, M.A. & Rudzinski, M. (1993). Familiarity and transparency in idiom explanation: A developmental study of children and adolescents. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36(4), 728—737.
33.
Nippold, M.A. & Taylor, C.L. (1995). Idiom understanding in youth: Further examination of familiarity and transparency. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 426—433.
34.
Nippold, M.A., Taylor, C.L. & Baker, J.M. (1996). Idiom understanding in Australian youth: A cross—cultural comparison. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 39(2), 442—447.
35.
Ortony, A., Turner, T.J. & Larson-Shapiro, N. (1985). Cultural and instructional influences on figurative language comprehension by inner city children. Research in the Teaching of English, 19, 25—36.
36.
Paris, S.G. & Upton, L.R. (1976). Children's memory for inferential relationships in prose. Child Development, 47, 660—668.
37.
Perkins, M.R. (1999). Productivity and formulaicity in language development . In M. Garman, C. Letts, B. Richards, C. Schelletter & S. Edwards (Eds), Issues in normal and disordered child language: From phonology to narrative. Special edition of the New Bulmershe Papers (pp. 51—67). Reading: University of Reading.
38.
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of verb-argument structure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
39.
Quirk, R. and Greenbaum, S. (1973). A university grammar of English. Harlow: Longman.
40.
Reilly, J.S. (1986). The acquisition of temporals and conditionals . In E. C. Traugott, A. Ter Meulen, J. S. Reilly & C. A. Ferguson (Eds), On conditionals (pp. 309—331). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41.
Rumelhart, D.E. (1979). Some problems with the notion of literal meaning . In A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and thought (pp. 78—90). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
42.
Side, R. (1990). Phrasal verbs: Sorting them out. ELT Journal, 44(2), 144—152.
43.
Theakston, A., Lieven, E.V.M., Pine, J.M. & Rowland, C.F. (2004). Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax. Journal of Child Language, 31, 61—99.
44.
Tomasello, M. (1992). First verbs: A case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
45.
Vieiro, P. & Garcia-Madruga, J.A. (1997). An analysis of story comprehension through spoken and written summaries in school-age children . Reading and Writing, 9, 41—53.
46.
Walsh, M., Richardson, K. & Faulkner, D. (1993). Perceptual, thematic and taxonomic relations in children's mental representations: Responses to triads. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 8(1), 85—102.
47.
Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
48.
Wray, A. & Perkins, M.R. (2000). The functions of formulaic language: An integrated model. Language and Communication, 20, 1—28.
