L1 acquisition of Idiomatic Expressions:A Case Study of Chou in Mandarin

• Main Authors: Cheng, Shu-Chun, 鄭淑君
• Other Authors: Chen, Chun-yin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/58159017681741418342

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 104 === The present study investigates first language acquisition of figurative language. By examining chou-related idioms in Chinese, the present study aims to observe the developmental processes through which children, adolescents and adults gradually establish the requisite figurative competence necessary for the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Four research questions regarding the acquisition of metaphoricality, the types of idioms (quadra-syllabic and non-quadra types), the familiarity effect and linguistic context are discussed in detail. In this study, all participants were asked to complete two comprehension tasks including a Word-in-Isolation and a Word-in-Context task. The total number of participants was seventy-five and they were further divided into five groups by their mean age (six, seven, nine, twelve and fifteen years of age). Fifteen adults were also recruited as the controls. The research findings can be summarized as follows: There were six developmental stages observed in the interpretation of chou-related idioms. First of all, participants of the five experimental groups were found to be influenced both by the types of idioms and the familiarity effect. Children at ages 6 and 7 primarily produced literal interpretations of the tested chou-related idioms. With the contextual aid, these two groups made significant progress in the interpretation of familiar non-quadra type of idioms. Then, 9-year-old children displayed the ability to metaphorically interpret familiar non-quadra and quadra-syllabic idioms; additionally, the contextual effect also remarkably improved their performance. As for the participants of ages 9 and 15, they were capable of interpreting chou-related idioms without the aid of the context, but their performance still lagged behind that of the adult controls. This indicates that a significant interaction between the age effect and the tested chou-phrases was at play.