ABSTRACT
Studies of children's understanding of nonliteral discourse have typically assumed comprehension to be present (and fully developed) when children are able to demonstrate understanding of the speaker's implied meaning (e.g., Ackerman, 1981; Demorest, Meyer, Phelps, Gardner, & Winner, 1984; Keil, 1986; Vosniadou & Ortony, 1986; Vosniadou, Ortony, Reynolds, & Wilson, 1984; Winner, Rosenstiel, & Gardner, 1976). Thus, Demorest et al. credited children with full understanding of verbal irony when they recognized that a positive comment said in sarcastic intonation about a negative situation was intended as an insult rather than as a compliment. For example, children heard a story in which a speaker says in sarcastic intonation, Your haircut looks terrific, to someone who has an obviously bad haircut. When children indicated that they understood that the speaker meant that the haircut was, in fact, bad rather than good, they were considered to have understood the utterance. The same assumption was made in studies of metaphor. For example, Vosniadou and Ortony (1986) told children a story about a shy child named Sally whose mother is taking her to her first day of school. The story ends with a sentence containing the metaphor "Sally was a bird flying to her nest." When children could show through enactment with dolls or through verbal paraphrase that this meant that Sally ran back to her mother (rather than that Sally turned into a bird), they were considered to have understood the metaphor.
