Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do young children make sense of idioms in everyday contexts? A picture selection task was used to test differences in 3- and 5-year-old’s prediction strategies when an idiom is used to update story events. Norwegian-speaking children (N=162) were asked to predict story outcomes from a display of options based on cognitive heuristics. The results show that 5-year-olds are significantly more likely than 3-year-olds to choose literal interpretations of idioms as story outcomes (δ = 0.12). Neither group are more likely to select the correct idiomatic interpretation. Furthermore, 5-year-olds choose the correct outcome significantly more when there is no literal option available onscreen (δ = 0.15). Age-related differences may be due to developments in metalinguistic reflexivity.