Two experiments examined pictorial humor as an unusual but legitimate way to approach the study of children's representational activity and the transition from implicit to explicit knowledge. In both experiments, the participants were 3- and 4-year-old children. Experiment 1 studied the understanding of two pictorial jokes using two conditions,…

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they…

In the experiments reported here grammaticalness and meaningfulness were found to be of much greater significance than word frequency, interword association or syntactic frame in the comprehension of deviant sentences. (Author/FWB)

Concludes that linguistic and visual-linguistic training sessions do not increase children's ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences. (MH)