caa a22 4500 386359288 CHVBK 20180307111910.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0305000900010473 doi S0305000900010473 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0305000900010473 How children understand idioms in discourse [Elektronische Daten] Some studies have shown that children tend to interpret figurative language literally. Our hypothesis is that they can reach an idiomatic competence if idioms are presented within a rich informational environment allowing children to grasp their figurative sense. First and third graders were presented with narratives biased both to the figurative meaning of idioms (experiment 1) and to the literal meaning (experiment 2) and then given a comprehension task. Experiment 3 was designed to investigate children's production of idioms as compared to the comprehension abilities explored in experiments 1 and 2. Results show that informative contexts can improve children's ability to perceive idiomatic meanings even at the age of seven; and that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them. Generally results emphasize that children seem able to perceive that language can be both figurative and literal. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Cacciari Cristina Università di Bologna Levorato Maria Chiara Università di Verona Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 387-405 0305-0009 16:2<387 1989 16 JCL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010473 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010473 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Cacciari Cristina Università di Bologna NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Levorato Maria Chiara Università di Verona NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 387-405 0305-0009 16:2<387 1989 16 JCL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge