La Comprensione e la Ristrutturazione di Storie nei Bambini..

Comprensione di testi strutturati narrativi, in adulti e in bambin

The creation of new figurative expressions: psycholinguistic evidence in Italian children, adolescents and adults

According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition - the GLOBAL ELABORATION MODEL (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and eight children aged 9; 6, one hundred and twenty-four children aged I 1; 3, one hundred and twelve adolescents aged 18; 5 and one hundred adults participated in Experiment 1 which studied the development of metalinguistic awareness through an elicitation task. The subjects produced a high percentage of figurative expressions with a clear developmental trend that is concluded in adolescence. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the production of comprehensible, appropriate and novel metaphors, as they were rated by adult judges, also increased with age. These results show that the ability to use figurative language in a creative and sensible way requires a long developmental time span and is strictly connected with the ability to reflect on language as a complex cognitive and interpersonal phenomenon

Reading comprehension and understanding idiomatic expressions: A developmental study

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child´s text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests (Cornoldi & Colpo.. 1998) to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., break the ice). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted children´s understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in children´s comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test