Abstract:
Research showed that children need two important pragmatic skills to understand Simile: understanding the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature. However, the second skill has not been studied yet by Iranian researchers. The aim of the present study was to investigate the ability of mono-lingual Persian-speaking children aged 5 to 7 years old and adults in understanding scalar implicature. To this aim, 30 Persian speaking children 5, 6 and 7 years old were selected and were compared with 10 adults. The groups were investigated and compared on a first experiment which was a form of similarity judgment task and on a second experiment, which was in a form of a game. In the first experiment, subjects should understand "x is like a y" as an expression of similarity. In the second experiment, the subjects received metaphors (“Nina is a rabbit”) and similes (“Nina is like a rabbit) as clues to select one of a three images (a rabbit, a girl or a rabbit looking girl). The results showed that 5 years old children were able to understand the implicature “x is not a y”, whereas 7-6 years old children performed like adults. The results showed that children from the early childhood were able to understand and extract scalar implicature and the literal meaning of simile and metaphor decreased by increasing age
Machine summary:
The results of the research showed that children are able to understand and extract scalar implicature from the age of 5, and with increasing age, the selection of the literal meaning of simile and metaphor decreases.
Citation: Khani, Arezoo; Jamali, Ali, Khoshbakht, Tayybeh; (1403): Comparison of Understanding Scalar Implicature in 5-7 Year Old Children and Adult Persian Monolinguals: Linguistic Research, Year 15, Number 2, Autumn and Winter, Consecutive 29- (99-124).
jolr/1022059 :DOI Publisher: Tehran University Press 103 Comparison of Understanding Scalar Implicature in 5-7 Year Old Children and Adult Persian Monolinguals 1.
3. Background of the Research Numerous foreign studies have been conducted on the understanding of scalar implicature by children, including the research conducted by Novek 3 (2001), which is consistent with some of the research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the research conducted by Braine 4 and Rumain 5 (1981) and Smith 6 (1980), which observed that French-speaking children aged 8 to 10 considered sentences such as “Some elephants have trunks” to be correct, and this indicates a logical interpretation of a quantifier7.
The 5-year-old children studied in the present research were able to understand and extract scalar implicature, and this was observable from the frequency of their pragmatic responses in the simile section of the second experiment.
In the present research, consistent with the research of Falkum 1, Recasens 2 and Clark 3 (2017), the better pragmatic performance of participants in simile sentences compared to metaphorical sentences may indicate that young children are able to extract scalar implicature before understanding metaphor.
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