Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T21:35:08.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Interpreting physical and mental metaphors: Is Theory of Mind associated with pragmatics in middle childhood?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2018

Serena LECCE Open the ORCID record for Serena LECCE [Opens in a new window] ,
Luca RONCHI Open the ORCID record for Luca RONCHI [Opens in a new window] ,
Paola DEL SETTE Open the ORCID record for Paola DEL SETTE [Opens in a new window] ,
Luca BISCHETTI Open the ORCID record for Luca BISCHETTI [Opens in a new window]  and
Valentina BAMBINI Open the ORCID record for Valentina BAMBINI [Opens in a new window]
Serena LECCE
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy
Luca RONCHI
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy
Paola DEL SETTE
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy
Luca BISCHETTI
Affiliation:
Center for Neurocognition, Epistemology and theoretical Syntax (NEtS), University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Italy
Valentina BAMBINI*
Affiliation:
Center for Neurocognition, Epistemology and theoretical Syntax (NEtS), University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Italy
*
*Corresponding author: Valentina Bambini, Center for Neurocognition, Epistemology and theoretical Syntax (NEtS), School of Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Piazza della Vittoria 15, 27100 Pavia, Italy; fax +39-0382375899; tel +39-0382375841; E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well as in the interpretation of mental, but not physical, metaphors. Moreover, nine-year-olds (but not older children) who are better in ToM are also better in interpreting mental, but not physical, metaphors. This suggests that the link between metaphor and ToM is stronger when metaphorical interpretation involves mental aspects, and it is more evident in early rather than later childhood.

Keywords

pragmaticsexperimental pragmaticsfigurative language
Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 393 - 407
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrés-Roqueta, C., & Katsos, N. (2017). The contribution of grammar, vocabulary and theory of mind in pragmatic language competence in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 996. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00996Google Scholar
Bambini, V., Gentili, C., Ricciardi, E., Bertinetto, P. M., & Pietrini, P. (2011). Decomposing metaphor processing at the cognitive and neural level through functional magnetic resonance imaging. Brain Research Bulletin, 86(3/4), 203–16.10.1016/j.brainresbull.2011.07.015Google Scholar
Bambini, V., Ghio, M., Moro, A., & Schumacher, P. B. (2013). Differentiating among pragmatic uses of words through timed sensicality judgments. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 938. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00938Google Scholar
Bambini, V., Resta, D., & Grimaldi, M. (2014). A dataset of metaphors from the Italian literature: exploring psycholinguistic variables and the role of context. PLoS ONE, 9(9). doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0105634Google Scholar
Bosco, F. M., & Gabbatore, I. (2017). Sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts and the role of the theory of mind in childhood. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 21. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00021Google Scholar
Bosco, F. M., Tirassa, M., & Gabbatore, I. (2018). Why pragmatics and Theory of Mind do not (completely) overlap. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1453. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01453Google Scholar
Bosia, M., Arcara, G., Buonocore, M., Bechi, M., Moro, A., Cavallaro, R., & Bambini, V. (2016). Communication in schizophrenia, between pragmatics, cognition and social cognition. In Di Sciullo, A. M. (ed.), Biolinguistic investigations on the language faculty (pp. 213–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.235.10bosGoogle Scholar
Caillies, S., & Le Sourn-Bissaoui, S. (2008). Children's understanding of idioms and theory of mind development. Developmental Science, 11(5), 703–11.10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00720.xGoogle Scholar
Carriedo, N., Corral, A., Montoro, P. R., Herrero, L., Ballestrino, P., & Sebastián, I. (2016). The development of metaphor comprehension and its relationship with relational verbal reasoning and executive function. PLoS ONE, 11(3), 1–20. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150289Google Scholar
Carston, R. (2010). Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: a relevance theory perspective. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 22(1), 153–80.Google Scholar
Castelli, F., Happé, F., Frith, U., & Frith, C. (2000). Movement and mind: a functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns. NeuroImage, 12(3), 314–25.10.1006/nimg.2000.0612Google Scholar
Champagne-Lavau, M., & Stip, E. (2010). Pragmatic and executive dysfunction in schizophrenia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23(3), 285–96.Google Scholar
Chiappe, D. L., & Chiappe, P. (2007). The role of working memory in metaphor production and comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(2), 172–88.10.1016/j.jml.2006.11.006Google Scholar
Columbus, G., Sheikh, N. A., Côté-Lecaldare, M., Häuser, K., Baum, S. R., & Titone, D. (2015). Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: an eye movement study of sentence reading. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 1057. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.01057Google Scholar
Currie, C., Molcho, M., Boyce, W., Holstein, B., Torsheim, T., & Richter, M. (2008). Researching health inequalities in adolescents: the development of the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Family Affluence Scale. Social Science & Medicine, 66(6), 1429–36.10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.11.024Google Scholar
Filippova, E., & Astington, J. W. (2008). Further development in social reasoning revealed in discourse irony understanding. Child Development, 79(1), 126–38.10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01115.xGoogle Scholar
Gernsbacher, M. A., & Pripas-Kapit, S. R. (2012). Who's missing the point? A commentary on claims that autistic persons have a specific deficit in figurative language comprehension. Metaphor and Symbol, 27(1), 93–105.10.1080/10926488.2012.656255Google Scholar
Grigoroglou, M., & Papafragou, A. (2017). Acquisition of pragmatics. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics (pp. 1–39). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: a test of relevance theory. Cognition, 48(2), 101–19.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E. (1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: understanding of story characters’ thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal children and adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24(2), 129–54.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66(3), 843–55.10.2307/1131954Google Scholar
Kalandadze, T., Norbury, C., Naerland, T., & Naess, K.-A. B. (2018). Figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: a meta-analytic review. Autism, 22(2), 99–117.10.1177/1362361316668652Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond modularity: a developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/1579.001.0001Google Scholar
Kempler, D., VanLancker, D., Marchman, V., & Bates, E. (1999). Idiom comprehension in children and adults with unilateral brain damage. Developmental Neuropsychology, 15(3), 327–49.10.1080/87565649909540753Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion: language, culture, and the body in human feeling. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lecce, S., Bianco, F., Devine, R. T., & Hughes, C. (2017). Relations between theory of mind and executive function in middle childhood: a short-term longitudinal study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 163, 69–86.Google Scholar
Lecce, S., Zocchi, S., Pagnin, A., Palladino, P., & Taumoepeau, M. (2010). Reading minds: the relation between children's mental state knowledge and their metaknowledge about reading. Child Development, 81(6), 1876–93.10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01516.xGoogle Scholar
Marconi, L., Ott, M., Pesenti, E., Ratti, D., & Tavella, M. (1994). Lessico Elementare. Dati statistici sull'italiano scritto e letto dai bambini delle elementari. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar
Massaro, D., Valle, A., & Marchetti, A. (2013). Irony and second-order false belief in children: What changes when mothers rather than siblings speak? European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10(3), 301–17.10.1080/17405629.2012.672272Google Scholar
Matthews, D., Biney, H., & Abbot-Smith, K. (2018). Individual differences in children's pragmatic ability: a review of associations with formal language, social cognition, and executive functions. Language Learning and Development, 14(3), 186–223.10.1080/15475441.2018.1455584Google Scholar
Melogno, S., Pinto, M. A., & Di Filippo, G. (2017). Sensory and physico-psychological metaphor comprehension in children with ASD: a preliminary study on the outcomes of a treatment. Brain Sciences, 7(7), 85. doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7070085Google Scholar
Milligan, K., Astington, J. W., & Dack, L. A. (2007). Language and Theory of Mind: meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development, 78(2), 622–46.Google Scholar
Norbury, C. F. (2005). The relationship between theory of mind and metaphor: evidence from children with language impairment and autistic spectrum disorder. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 383–99.10.1348/026151005X26732Google Scholar
Noveck, I. A., Bianco, M., & Castry, A. (2001). The costs and benefits of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 16(1), 109–21.Google Scholar
Olkoniemi, H., Ranta, H., & Kaakinen, J. K. (2016). Individual differences in the processing of written sarcasm and metaphor: evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(3), 433–50.Google Scholar
Orsini, A. (1997). WISC-R. Contributo alla taratura italiana [Contribution to Italian norms]. Firenze: Organizzazioni Speciali.Google Scholar
Peterson, E., & Miller, S. F. (2012). The eyes test as a measure of individual differences: How much of the variance reflects verbal IQ? Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 220. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00220Google Scholar
Pinto, M. A., Melogno, S., & Iliceto, P. (2006). Test di comprensione delle metafore. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
Pouscoulous, N. (2014). ‘The elevator's buttocks’: metaphorical abilities in children. In Matthews, D. (Ed.), Pragmatic development in first language acquisition (pp. 239–60). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rubini, V., & Rossi, M. A. (1982). Analysis of the psycho-metric characteristics of the Primary Mental Abilities Tests (Level 4-sup-6, 1962 revision) applied to a group of Italian subjects. Bollettino Di Psicologia Applicata, 161–164, 87–105.Google Scholar
Slaughter, V., & De Rosnay, M. (Eds.). (2017). Theory of mind development in context. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind and Language, 17(1/2), 3–23.Google Scholar
Vosniadou, S., Ortony, A., Reynolds, R. E., & Wilson, P. T. (1984). Sources of difficulty in the young child's understanding of metaphorical language. Child Development, 55(4), 1588–606.Google Scholar
Vulchanova, M., Saldaña, D., Chahboun, S., & Vulchanov, V. (2015). Figurative language processing in atypical populations: the ASD perspective. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 24. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00024Google Scholar
Vulchanova, M., Vulchanov, V., & Stankova, M. (2011). Idiom comprehension in the first language: a developmental study. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 207–34.Google Scholar
Wang, C., & Dowker, A. (2010). A cross-cultural study of metaphoric understanding. In Low, G., Todd, Z., Deignan, A., & Cameron, L. (Eds.), Researching and applying metaphor in the real world (pp. 105–22). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Westra, E., & Carruthers, P. (2017). Pragmatic development explains the Theory-of-Mind Scale. Cognition, 158, 165–76.Google Scholar
White, S., Hill, E., Happé, F., & Frith, U. (2009). Revisiting the Strange Stories: revealing mentalizing impairments in Autism. Child Development, 80(4), 1097–117.Google Scholar
Whyte, E. M., & Nelson, K. E. (2015). Trajectories of pragmatic and nonliteral language development in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Communication Disorders, 54, 2–14.Google Scholar
Winner, E., Rosenstiel, A. K., & Gardner, H. (1976). The development of metaphoric understanding. Developmental Psychology, 12(4), 289–97.Google Scholar