Arezou Khani; Ali Jamali; Tayebeh Khoshbakht
Abstract
Research showed that children need two important pragmatic skills to understand Simile: understanding the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature. ...
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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
