Early Acquisition of Figurative Competence: Comprehension of Idiomatic Expressions in Turkish Between Seven and Eleven Years of Age

Abstract

As one type of figurative language, idiomatic expressions are found in a majority of human communication. With their structural, semantic and discourse features and constraints, idiomatic expressions differ substantially from literal language. The characteristic say-mean distinction, the conceptual complexity and the semantic quality inherent in idioms have attracted the attention of many scholars in recent years. Traditionally, idioms were treated as multi-word expressions, exhibiting a certain degree of frozenness or flexibility, as nondecomposable in their semantic make-up, and most importantly, they were regarded as a matter of language only. However, the cognitive-linguistic view of idioms regarded them as products of our conceptual system and that many idioms are conceptually motivated, which entails an interplay between domains of knowledge in the human conceptual system. Studies investigating the acquisition of idiomatic expressions in a developmental framework revealed that