Author: Caillies, Stephanie; Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Sandrine
Description: 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.
Subject headings: Child; Child Development; Child, Preschool; Comprehension; Concept Formation; Humans; Intelligence; Language Development; Language Tests; Psychology, Child; Semantics
Publication year: 2008
Journal or book title: Developmental Science
Volume: 11
Issue: 5
Pages: 703-711
Find the full text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00720.x
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Serial number: 3787