This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s (age 3–7) comprehension development of novel and conventional metonymy, combining online and offline methods. Both online and offline data show significantly better performances from the oldest group (6-to-7-year-old) and a delayed acquisition of conventional metonymy compared with novel metonymy. However, part of offline data shows no significant difference between adjacent age groups, while the eye-tracking data show a chronological development from age 3–7. Furthermore, in offline tasks, the three-year-old group features a high choice randomness and the four-to-five-year-olds show the longest reaction time. Therefore, we argue that, not only age but also metonymy type can influence metonymy acquisition, and that a lack of socio-cultural experience can be a source of acquisition difficulty for children under six. Methodologically speaking, we believe that online methods should not be considered superior to offline ones as they investigate different aspects of implicit and explicit language comprehension.

中文翻译：

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以普通话为母语的儿童转喻理解发展的实证研究


本研究调查了讲普通话的儿童（3-7 岁）对新颖和传统转喻的理解发展，结合了线上和线下方法。在线和离线数据都显示，与新型转喻相比，最年长的群体（6 至 7 岁）的表现明显更好，并且对传统转喻的获取延迟。然而，部分离线数据显示相邻年龄组之间没有显著差异，而眼动追踪数据显示从 3-7 岁开始按时间顺序发展。此外，在离线任务中，三岁组具有很高的选择随机性，而四到五岁的孩子表现出最长的反应时间。因此，我们认为，不仅年龄，而且转喻类型也会影响转喻的习得，而缺乏社会文化经验可能是 6 岁以下儿童习得困难的根源。从方法论上讲，我们认为在线方法不应被认为优于离线方法，因为它们研究了隐性和显式语言理解的不同方面。