"The moustache sits down first": on the acquisition of metonymy

Metaphor comprehension and production in verbally able children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek-speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically-developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low-verbal multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no-responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD.

That kid is a grasshopper! Metaphor development from 3 to 9 years of age

Two major trends on children's skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children's capability to comprehend novel metaphors ('X is a Y') in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection task, while also tracking their gaze. Further, given recent findings on the development of metonymy comprehension suggesting a U-shaped developmental curve for this phenomenon (Köder & Falkum, 2020), we aimed to determine the shape of the developmental trajectory of novel metaphor comprehension, and to explore how both types of data (picture selection and gaze behavior) relate to each other. Our results suggest a linear developmental trajectory with 6-year-olds significantly succeeding in picture selection and consistently looking at the metaphorical target even after question onset.

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non-literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD.

Preschoolers and adults metonymically extend proper names to owned objects

Three preregistered experiments, conducted in 2021, investigated whether English-speaking American preschoolers (N = 120; 4-6 years; 54 females, predominantly White) and adults (N = 80; 18-52 years; 59 females, predominantly Asian) metonymically extend owners' names to owned objects-an extension not typically found in English. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds and adults extended names to owned objects over duplicates (d = 0.34 in children; d = 1.13 in adults). In Experiment 2, 5- and 6-year-olds and adults extended names to owned over borrowed objects (d = 1.37 in children; d = 4.34 in adults). Experiment 3 replicated this finding with 4-year-olds (d = 0.43). Thus, English-speaking preschoolers can acquire semantic generalizations, even those not present in their language.

More than one path to pragmatics? Insights from children's grasp of implicit, figurative and ironical meaning

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The development of pragmatic abilities presents us with a puzzle. On the one hand, much evidence suggests pragmatics play a grounding role in early communication and language acquisition. On the other, preschoolers find linguistic pragmatic inferences such as implicatures, metaphor and irony difficult to grasp. Apperly and Butterfill (2009) maintain that there are two separate systems for belief reasoning: a simpler one and a more sophisticated one that develops later. Along this line of reasoning we might also expect there to be two separate kinds of pragmatic abilities: an early set using (among other things) the simpler Theory of Mind system, and a more sophisticated one appearing later in childhood and using full-blown Theory of Mind. I will argue there is no need to divide pragmatic abilities in such a way to bridge the gap between the pragmatic inferential skills found in toddlers and the difficulties observed in preschoolers. Evidence from the past two decades indicates that phenomena such as implicatures and metaphor (but not irony) can be understood earlier than previously established. Additionally, children's apparent struggle with specific pragmatic inferences might be better explained by factors independent from pragmatic competence, but which interact with it.

Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers' Processing of Novel Communicative Cues

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in three studies in which toddlers (N = 90) searched for a reward hidden in one of several containers. In all studies, an adult communicated the reward's location with an unfamiliar and ambiguous cue. We manipulated the processing costs (operationalized as inferential chain length) and cognitive benefits (operationalized as informativeness) of the possible interpretations of the cues. Toddlers processing of novel communicative cues were guided by expectations of low processing costs (Study 1) and high cognitive benefits (Studies 2 and 3). More specifically, toddlers treated novel cues as if they were easy to process, informative, and accurate, even when provided with repeated evidence to the contrary. These results indicate that, from toddlerhood onward, expectations of cognitive utility shape the processing of novel communicative cues. These data also reveal that toddlers, who are in the process of learning the language and communicative conventions of people around them, exert a pressure favoring cognitive efficiency in communicative systems.

Preschoolers modulate contrastive inferences during online language comprehension

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., "Look at the big duck"). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4-year-olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.

Preschoolers and Adults Learn From Novel Metaphors

Although adults use metaphors to guide their thinking and reasoning, less is known about whether metaphors might facilitate cognition earlier in development. Previous research shows that preschoolers understand metaphors, but less is known about whether preschoolers can learn from metaphors. The current preregistered experiment investigated whether adults (n = 64) and 3- and 4-year-olds (n = 128) can use metaphors to make new inferences. In a between-subjects design, participants heard information about novel artifacts, conveyed through either only positive metaphors (e.g., "Daxes are suns") or positive and negative metaphors (e.g., "Daxes are suns. Daxes are not clouds."). In both conditions, participants of all ages successfully formed metaphor-consistent inferences about abstract, functional features of the artifacts (e.g., that daxes light up rather than let out water). Moreover, participants frequently provided explanations appealing to the metaphors when justifying their responses. Consequently, metaphors may be a powerful learning mechanism from early childhood onward.

What does it take to be rigid? Reflections on the notion of rigidity in autism

Characterizations of autism include multiple references to rigid or inflexible features, but the notion of rigidity itself has received little systematic discussion. In this paper we shed some light on the notion of rigidity in autism by identifying different facets of this phenomenon as discussed in the literature, such as fixed interests, insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, black-and-white mentality, intolerance of uncertainty, ritualized patterns of verbal and non-verbal behavior, literalism, and discomfort with change. Rigidity is typically approached in a disjointed fashion (i.e., facet by facet), although there are recent attempts at providing unifying explanations. Some of these attempts assume that the rigidity facets mainly relate to executive functioning: although such an approach is intuitively persuasive, we argue that there are equally plausible alternative explanations. We conclude by calling for more research on the different facets of rigidity and on how they cluster together in the autistic population, while suggesting some ways in which intervention could benefit from a finer-grained view of rigidity.

Irony and Perspective-Taking in Children: The Roles of Norm Violations and Tone of Voice

In order to understand most, if not any communicative act, the listener needs to make inferences about what the speaker intends to convey. This perspective-taking process is especially challenging in the case of nonliteral uses of language such as verbal irony (e.g., "Thanks for your help!" uttered to someone who has not provided the expected support). Children have been shown to have difficulties with the comprehension of irony well into the school years, but the factors that hamper or facilitate children's perspective-taking in irony comprehension are not well understood. This study takes as its starting point the relevance-theoretic echoic analysis of verbal irony, and focuses on two of irony's distinctive features as defined by this theory: (i) the normative bias and (ii) the characteristic tone of voice. In this study, we investigated the comprehension of irony in children aged 3-8. We manipulated these two factors, namely, the violation of different types of norms and the use of different tones of voice - to see how they affected children's processing and interpretation of irony. Using an irony comprehension task that combined picture selection and eye-tracking, we found that the type of norm violation affected 4-to 5-year-olds' offline understanding of irony, with a better performance on moral compared with social norm violations. Tone of voice had an effect on gaze behavior in adults, but not children, although a parodic, pretense-oriented tone of voice tended to lead to more looks to the angry compared with the happy emoticon at the offset of the ironical utterance, potentially facilitating children's irony understanding. Our results show that the understanding of irony can be detected on explicit measures around age 6 - with the emergence of second-order perspective-taking abilities - but that a sensitivity to some of irony's features can be detected several years earlier. Finally, our study provides a novel input to the debate on the existence of a so-called literal stage in pragmatic development, in particular regarding 3-year-olds' differential performance on the offline and online measures of irony understanding, suggesting that they are not naively mistaking ironical utterances for "ordinary" literal ones.

Three-year-olds' comprehension of contrastive and descriptive adjectives: Evidence for contrastive inference

Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate adjectives and nouns, and may instead over-rely on noun information when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Thorpe, Baumgartner, & Fernald, 2006). This disjointed processing has implications for pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives from making contrastive inferences (Huang & Snedeker, 2013). Using a novel experimental design that allows preschoolers time to demonstrate their abilities in adjective-noun integration and in contrastive inference, two visual world experiments investigate how English-speaking three-year-olds (N = 73, M_age = 44 months) process size adjectives across syntactic (prenominal; postnominal) and pragmatic (descriptive; contrastive) contexts. We show that preschoolers are able to integrate adjectives and nouns to resolve reference accurately by the end of the referring expression, in a variety of pragmatic and syntactic contexts and in the presence of multiple distractors. We reveal for the first time that they can contrastively infer, given a slowed speed of presentation and visually salient size contrasts. Our findings provide evidence for a continuity in the development of pragmatic skills, which do not appear to be linked to children's language proficiency or speed of processing.

The Development of Simile Comprehension: From Similarity to Scalar Implicature

Similes require two different pragmatic skills: appreciating the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature (e.g., "Lucy is like a parrot" normally implies that Lucy is not a parrot), but previous studies overlooked this second skill. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 48; ages 3-5) understood "X is like a Y" as an expression of similarity. In Experiment 2 (N = 99; ages 3-6, 13) and Experiment 3 (N = 201; ages 3-5 and adults), participants received metaphors ("Lucy is a parrot") or similes ("Lucy is like a parrot") as clues to select one of three images (a parrot, a girl or a parrot-looking girl). An early developmental trend revealed that 3-year-olds started deriving the implicature "X is not a Y," whereas 5-year-olds performed like adults.

On the regularity of metonymy across languages (exemplified on some metonymies in medical discourse)

The topic of metonymy regularity has cropped up in several recent articles, a welcome sign of growing interest in this phenomenon, which may eventually contribute towards shedding more light on the phenomenon of metonymic competence, paralleling metaphoric competence (Littlemore & Low, 2006). However, in order to deal with this complex phenomenon one should be clear about the circumstances of the use of metonymy. Two issues pertaining to the use of metonymy that play a central role in Slabakova, Cabrelli Amaro & Kang (2013 & 2016) are mentioned in the very title of their study—novel metonymy and regular metonymy. In this article I draw attention to some problems with the assumption that these are opposites of each other and then examine what Slabakova, Cabrelli Amaro & Kang consider to be regular metonymy. I demonstrate that while their novel metonymies are not really so different from the regular ones, there is another sense of metonymy regularity in cognitive linguistics, where metonymy seems to come closest it can to novelty. This phenomenon, referred to as regular metonymy, logical metonymy or logical polysemy, crosses boundaries of languages and cultures. This is illustrated on several sets of examples from medical discourse in a number of languages.

Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.

Figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analytic review

We present a meta-analysis of studies that compare figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and in typically developing controls who were matched based on chronological age or/and language ability. A total of 41 studies and 45 independent effect sizes were included based on predetermined inclusion criteria. Group matching strategy, age, types of figurative language, and cross-linguistic differences were examined as predictors that might explain heterogeneity in effect sizes. Overall, individuals with autism spectrum disorder showed poorer comprehension of figurative language than their typically developing peers (Hedges' g = -0.57). A meta-regression analysis showed that group matching strategy and types of figurative language were significantly related to differences in effect sizes, whereas chronological age and cross-linguistic differences were not. Differences between the autism spectrum disorder and typically developing groups were small and nonsignificant when the groups were matched based on the language ability. Metaphors were more difficult to comprehend for individuals with autism spectrum disorder compared with typically developing controls than were irony and sarcasm. Our findings highlight the critical role of core language skills in figurative language comprehension. Interventions and educational programmes designed to improve social communication skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder may beneficially target core language skills in addition to social skills.