The role of linguistic context in children’s interpretation and acquisition of Cicewa idiomatic expressions: A systemic functional linguistics approach

Abstract

Research findings have shown that linguistic context helps young children to infer the figurative meaning of an idiom and learn the meaning. In this study, the role of linguistic context in children’s interpretation and acquisition of idioms was tested in 20 Cicewa-speaking children aged 4, 6, 9, 12 and 14 years in three experiments. Experiment 1 tested children’s ability to interpret idiomatic expressions in story context, Experiment 2 tested children’s ability to interpret idiomatic expressions in sentence context and Experiment 3 tested children’s ability to interpret idiomatic expressions out of context. The study adopted Systemic Functional Linguistics to establish the role of linguistic context in children’s acquisition of Cicewa idioms. Our findings are: (1) Idioms are acquired as texts within the linguistic context in which they are produced and that linguistic context alone is not sufficient to facilitate idiom acquisition and interpretation. (2) Children come to know an idiomatic expression as a text before they understand the sociocultural context in which it is consumed. We argue that idioms are acquired as texts and they are acquired together with the sociocultural context in which they are produced and consumed, and therefore the sociocultural context forms part of the idioms.