華語「臭」字相關慣用語與成語之第一語言習得

Abstract

本研究旨在探討以華語為母語的學童如何詮釋華語「臭」字相關慣用語與成語。三大操縱變因包含慣用語與成語之差別、熟悉度和語境效應。本研究方法採用兩個口頭詮釋測驗，分別讓受試者在有無語境提示下詮釋「臭」字相關慣用語與成語。研究對象共分為六組，每組十五人，分別由平均年齡六歲、七歲、九歲、十二歲和十五歲學童與成人共九十位受試者所組成。 研究結果如下:首先，關於慣用語與成語兩類表現，可視為華語口語及書面語的掌握差異。五組學童組皆在慣用語之譬喻詮釋較佳，而成人組則為成語。然而，熟悉度被證實對大班、小二學童造成顯著影響。五組受試者皆在熟悉之慣用語與成語表現最佳，而成人組則在不熟悉類別仍表現優異。各組皆在提供語境測驗中展現較好的表現，所以語境效應的確能幫助六組受試者理解隱喻。最後，根據各組學童受試者與成人組之「臭」字相關慣用語與成語詮釋表現來看，可發現掌握隱喻之能力隨著年齡增加而進步。大班學童尚未具備詮釋隱喻之能力，其詮釋偏向字面意義為主。小二學童比大班表現佳，但仍較依賴字面意義。小四學童開始能詮釋隱喻。此三組兒童皆需要語境之提示達到正確詮釋隱喻。小六學童和九年級學生能在字詞獨立狀況下，成功詮釋隱喻，但此兩組表現仍未達成人組之表現。

The present study investigates first language acquisition of figurative language. By examining chou-related idioms in Chinese, the present study aims to observe the developmental processes through which children, adolescents and adults gradually establish the requisite figurative competence necessary for the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Four research questions regarding the acquisition of metaphoricality, the types of idioms (quadra-syllabic and non-quadra types), the familiarity effect and linguistic context are discussed in detail. In this study, all participants were asked to complete two comprehension tasks including a Word-in-Isolation and a Word-in-Context task. The total number of participants was seventy-five and they were further divided into five groups by their mean age (six, seven, nine, twelve and fifteen years of age). Fifteen adults were also recruited as the controls. The research findings can be summarized as follows: There were six developmental stages observed in the interpretation of chou-related idioms. First of all, participants of the five experimental groups were found to be influenced both by the types of idioms and the familiarity effect. Children at ages 6 and 7 primarily produced literal interpretations of the tested chou-related idioms. With the contextual aid, these two groups made significant progress in the interpretation of familiar non-quadra type of idioms. Then, 9-year-old children displayed the ability to metaphorically interpret familiar non-quadra and quadra-syllabic idioms; additionally, the contextual effect also remarkably improved their performance. As for the participants of ages 9 and 15, they were capable of interpreting chou-related idioms without the aid of the context, but their performance still lagged behind that of the adult controls. This indicates that a significant interaction between the age effect and the tested chou-phrases was at play.