Making Sense of Literal and Nonliteral Falsehood
- 1 March 1987
- journal article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
- Vol. 2 (1) , 13-32
- https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms0201_2
Abstract
Children's comprehension of literal and nonliteral falsehood was examined to determine (a) the role of memory demands and (b) the role of intonation and the relationship between sentence and speaker meaning in comprehension, in Experiment 1, 5-year-olds' comprehension of sarcasm, errors, and lies was assessed in high- and low-memory-demand conditions. Memory affected only comprehension of errors. In Experiment 2, comprehension of sarcasm, hyperbole, and understatement was assessed in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. These utterances differ in the relationship between sentence and speaker meaning: opposition (sarcasm), exaggeration (hyperbole), and minimization (understatement). Presence of intonation did not facilitate comprehension, hut type of underlying relationship did.Keywords
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