Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance

Abstract

ACKERMAN, BRIAN P. Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 485-497. The goal of this study was to determine if 7and 10-year-old children and adults are sensitive to their own and another listener's failure to understand literal and nonliteral (i.e., sarcastic) uses of utterances. In 3 experiments, subjects listened to stories containing either a literal or nonliteral utterance and a story listener's response to that utterance. Subjects' interpretations of the speaker's meaning and judgments of whether they had understood the utterance were assessed independently immediately after utterance presentation in Experiments 1 and 3 and after the listener's response in Experiment 2. Evaluation of the listener's understanding was assessed after the listener's response in all 3 experiments. In addition, context and intonation cues about the speaker's intent were manipulated concurrently in Experiments 1 and 2 and independently in Experiment 3. The results showed that the children had good understanding of the speaker's nonliteral intent based primarily on context cues and were quite sensitive to instances of their own incomprehension. However, the 7-year-olds did not evaluate the listener's understanding effectively. One of the problems here probably was that the children did not use their own interpretations of the speaker's intent as a monitoring or evaluative standard.