Several studies have made great contribution to the investigation of the development of idiomatic comprehension in the field of first language acquisition. These studies have been conducted by testing native speakers of several languages such as English, Italian, French and Bulgarian (Abkarian et al. 1992, Levorato & Cacciari 1995, 1999 and 2002, Laval 2003, Levorato & Cacciari 2004). The fundamental conclusions of these studies have become the model for future research on figurative expressions.
Based on the Markedness Theory (Eckman 1977), it is assumed that unmarked forms are more easily acquired than marked forms. Regarding metaphorical expressions, a literal meaning is unmarked since it represents the simplest possible word meaning. For children or second language learners, the literal meaning can be easily grasped without any effort as long
as they have learned and memorized the characters or vocabularies (Kintsch 1998). On the other hand, a marked form refers to a metaphorical meaning. This form poses challenges when language learners encounter metaphorical expressions.
This thesis investigates the chou-related idiomatic expressions in the acquisition of Mandarin-speaking children. In the task design of this thesis, idiomatic expressions will be further divided into two categories: quadra-syllabic and non-quadra-syllablic. According to the Markedness Theory, QIEs should be the marked form since semantic opacity and syntactic symmetry constitute the form of QIEs. In other words, learners have to put forth extra effort to memorize Chinese QIEs.
Regarding the theoretical background of idiom comprehension in first language acquisition, Levorato & Cacciari (2002) have previously proposed a developmental model called the Global Elaboration Model (GEM), as shown in Table 1-1. The GEM mainly accounts for children acquisition of idiom comprehension and production. For children, the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions should be possessed during the lexical and semantic development. Furthermore, the GEM predicts that it is not until the age of eight that children begin to sense the existence of idiomatic expressions. This model has been proposed in order to explain the five developmental phases regarding how and when children process figurative expressions. In Table 1-1, the five phases in GEM can be used as indicators to observe how children process metaphorical expressions.
Table 1-1 The Five Developmental Phases in the GEM2
(Levorato and Cacciari 2002:129-130) Prevalent Age Phase Description of figurative language
0-7 Phase 1 A primitive type of processing is carried out in the composition of piece-by-piece elaboration of the linguistic input. Children process language literally even when it does not make sense in the linguistic context.
8-9 Phase 2 Children start searching for the clues which could lead to a non-literal interpretation of the linguistic input. An acquired sensitivity toward the contextual information leads children from eight to nine years old to activate the world knowledge necessary to recover a meaning which might differ from the literal one. During this phase they realize that a discrepancy between what is said and what is expected on the basis of context should not always be interpreted as a communicative error.
10-12 Phase 3 The child acquires the knowledge that the same
communicative intention can be realized through different sentence forms (literally, idiomatically, metaphorically, and so forth) The internal state of speakers can also be taken into consideration.
15 Phase 4 The ability to use the conventional repertoire of
figurative expressions is achieved in this stage. The developmental gap between the ability to comprehend and to produce figurative expressions, still present;
however, it is progressively reduced, particularly as far as idiomatic expressions are concerned.
Adult-like Phase 5 The adult-like figurative competence is reached. The figurative language can be used in a creative way. Based on the awareness of meta-linguistic and metasemantic, the most mature acquisition is reached.
In addition, in Levorato & Cacciari (2002), other linguistic factors like meta-linguistic awareness and context were proven to be highly correlated to the acquisition of idiom
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comprehension in Italian children.
Kempler et al. (1999) claimed that children with unilateral damage aged from 10 to 11 would prove to have adult-like competence in idiom comprehension. On the other hand, Nippold (2003) investigated the idiom comprehension of the school-age children whose mother tongue is English. Based on the results of this study, primary school-aged children were shown to have a less sophisticated mental imagery of idioms than adults. In other words, the development of idiom comprehension can be viewed as a gradually formed process.
However, the research of other scholars in the field hold conflicting perspectives regarding the exact age at which children can process idiomatic expressions since various analytic methods have been adopted in these experiments. In Gibbs (1987) and Gibbs (1991), 5-year-old children were proven to have better performance in explaining transparent idioms. On the other hand, the GEM predicts that children who are younger than seven years old still do not possess the ability to interpret idiomatic expressions correctly.
Similar Mandarin Chinese studies were done in the same vein (Hsieh 2008, Hsieh & Hsu 2010, Hsu 2013). For example, Hsieh & Hsu (2010) examined three factors including the effect of familiarity, context and linguistic convention in Mandarin Chinese idiom comprehension.
Hsieh (2008) and Hsu (2013) targeted the specific Chinese figurative expressin si and lao respectively in their studies. From the syntax-based perspective of Hsieh, the main focus was on the syntactic properties of si-related words in Chinese. However, Hsu’s approach was more
semantic-oriented and presented an analysis about the animacy effect of lao-related words.