Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Lossius Falkum, The U-shaped curve

A puzzling feature of pragmatic development is the mixture of ability and difficulty pre-school children have with non-literal uses of language (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, irony, implicature). While children are in many respects expert communicators from early on and spontaneously produce both metaphors and metonymies, in interpretation they often have difficulty going beyond the conventional senses of words to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. In this theoretical paper, we discuss some recent experimental evidence that suggests that children’s performance on some non-literal language comprehension tasks follows a U-shaped trajectory, where older children seemingly perform worse than younger ones. This finding, if robust, promises to shed light on several issues in the development of pragmatics, and suggests a number of research questions. We outline some possible explanations for U-shaped curves in general, including i) real deterioration and subsequent improvement in an ability; ii) strategy change; iii) interference between mental systems; and iv) narrowing of focus driven by experience in a domain. We then outline some possible explanations for the apparent decline in children’s performance with figurative speech, including (a) increasing sophistication in pragmatic comprehension strategies; (b) increasing metalinguistic abilities, and (c) an increase in interest and/or ability with norms. We attempt to place these within the four categories, and we discuss how they may be connected. Finally, we discuss some broader implications of this finding for pragmatics more generally, including the influential view that literal and figurative utterances are processed the same way.