Nippold, M. A., & Haq, F. S. (1996). Proverb comprehension in youth: The role of concreteness and familiarity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 39(1), 166-176.
Nippold, M.; Haq, F.
1996
Nippold, M. A., & Haq, F. S. (1996). Proverb comprehension in youth: The role of concreteness and familiarity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 39(1), 166-176.
2
This study examined factors that were posited to play an important role in the development of proverb comprehension in school-age children and adolescents, namely, the concreteness and the familiarity of the expressions. Normally achieving students enrolled in Grades 5, 8, and 11 (n = 180) were administered a written forced-choice task that contained eight instances of four different types of proverbs: concrete-familiar ("A rolling stone gathers no moss"); concrete-unfamiliar ("A caged bird longs for the clouds"); abstract-familiar ("Two wrongs don't make a right"); and abstract-unfamiliar ("Of idleness comes no goodness"). Performance on the task steadily improved as a function of increasing grade level and, as predicted, the expressions proved to be differentially challenging: Concrete proverbs were easier to understand than abstract proverbs, and familiar proverbs were easier to understand than unfamiliar proverbs. The results concerning concreteness support the "metasemantic" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through active analysis of the words contained in proverbs. The results concerning familiarity support the "language experience" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through meaningful exposure to proverbs.
The results of this study indicate that proverb comprehension steadilty improves during the years between late childhood and late adolescence. However, the greatest amount of growth occurred between the fifth and eigth grades (ages 10 through 14 years). This pattern of rapid growth followed by continuous but slower progress is consistent with other studies that examined the comprehension of proverbs and other types of figurative languge such as idioms.
180
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