Intonational production as a window into children's early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two particles.

The use of the Norwegian intonation pattern Polarity Focus highlights the polarity of a contextually given thought and enables the speaker to signal whether she believes it to be a true or false description of some state of affairs. In this study, we investigate whether preschool children can produce this intonation pattern and what their productions reveal about the development of their early pragmatic abilities. We also explore their use of Polarity Focus in combination with two particles encoded by the linguistic form : a sentence-initial response particle, and a sentence-internal pragmatic particle.

Suppression of literal meaning in single and extended metaphors.

Within Relevance Theory, it has been suggested that extended metaphors might be processed differently relative to single metaphoric uses. While single metaphors are hypothesized to be understood the creation of an concept, extended metaphors have been claimed to require a switch to a secondary processing mode, which gives greater prominence to the literal meaning. Initial experimental evidence has supported a distinction by showing differences in reading times between single and extended metaphors.

Irony and Perspective-Taking in Children: The Roles of Norm Violations and Tone of Voice.

In order to understand most, if not any communicative act, the listener needs to make inferences about what the speaker intends to convey. This perspective-taking process is especially challenging in the case of nonliteral uses of language such as verbal irony (e.g.

"The moustache sits down first": on the acquisition of metonymy.

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animates metonymically on the basis of a salient property.