1. The effect on word understanding of active and passive participation in communication. Judit Fazekas 1, Csaba Pléh 1 1Department of Cognitive Science, Technical University of Budapest, Hungary fffjudit@gmail.com Preschool children are the age group usually connected with the understanding of novel expressions, since they have not yet acquired their native language completely. However, even adults encounter unknown expressions from time to time. Mapping this process for older age groups and comparing the data with that gathered from younger children is also valuable, as it reveals which linguistic and non-linguistic constraints guide the communication of a competent language user. Slang is a suitable word class to approach this question with, as apart from being very productive, it is also unique in that slang usually uses Hungarian expressions as a base and the knowledge of their meining varies greatly with age. Prefixed words are of special interest in the Hungarian language firstly because they form an open and extremely productive world class and secondly, their directional components usually express metaphorical meanings which make several interpretations possible. Material: -Slang: very productive, usually uses Hungarian expressions as a base, the knowledge of its meaning varies greatly with age. -Prefixed words: open, and extremely productiveve word class, the directional prefixes express metaphorical meaning. -Original expressions (used as primes) prefixed slang words, eg. rákattan (literally: clicks on, means gets into sg./so.) -Novel expressions (used as targets) the original slang words, where the orientation of the prefix was modified e.g. lekattan (modified version of rákattan, literally: clicks off) Know the meaning Do not know the meaning Yes (%)No (%) behal (dies in, slang for being impressed) 9,0990,9 bekattan (clicks in, slang for goes mad) 90,99,09 belezúg (falls in, slang for falls in love) 90,99,09 benyög (groans in, suddenly says sg.) 18,1881,81 berág (chews in, gets angry 72,7227,27 rákattan (clicks on, gets into) 68,1831,81 Overall58,3341,66 Participants and course of the experiment: -18, 3 male and 15 female university students, average age 22 (SD=1,58). -15, 7 male and 8 female 4th grade students, average age 9,4 (SD=0,48). -Primed lexical decision test to examine the interpretation strategies described below. -18 word pairs: 4 could be interpreted as the opposites and 5 as a synonyms. 9 control word pairs (fitted in length and frequency) were also featured in the experiment. -The prime word was visible for 60 ms in case of the university and 120 ms for the 4th grade students. The target word appeared immediately after the prime and was visible until the subject made a decision. Questionnaire: -4th grade students also completed a multiple choice questionnaire which was designed to assess their knowledge of the meanings of those slang words which served as a base for the other experiments. -After each word, four choices appeared from which one was the correct answer, one was connected to the concrete interpretation of the expression, one answer was not connected to the original expression and the last choice was always “there is no such word/I don’t know”. -Overall 58% of the 4th grade students were correct. See detailed results in Table 2. Interpretation strategies: Synonym strategy: the novel expression will be interpreted as the synonym of the original expression. Opposite strategy: the novel expression will be interpreted as the opposite of the original expression, if the direction of its prefix is opposite as well. -These strategies are based on two previous sentence completion studies which used the same expressions as the experiment presented here. Reults: -Significant speed-up (compared to the controls) in the synonym condition in both age-groups. -Significant slow-down (compared to the controls) in the opposite condition in case of the university students. -In case of the 4th grade students familiarity with the meaning (based on the questionnaires) did not influence reaction times. -While 4th grade students answered significantly slower when rejecting a word, there was no significant difference in the yes and no answers in case of the university students. Discussion: In the case of the university students a speed up was observable at the synonym and a slow-down at the opposition condition. This difference is most likely the result of different processing mechanisms in the two conditions. In the opposition condition a new meaning needs to be constructed based on the modified orientation of the prefix, and possibly competing meanings have to be suppressed as well. In the synonym condition the original meaning can simply be extended. The fact that that while the speed-up in the synonym condition appears in both age-groups, in case of the 4th grade students there is no slow-down in the opposite condition might suggest that the children’s knowledge bout the meaning of these words is not deep enough to deconstruct the words and create a new meaning but they can still extend the known meaning to a novel form. The results, which show that the knowledge of the word meaning did not influence the reaction times of the 4th grade students also support the suggestion that their knowledge about the words is more superficial than that of the adults. The children’s knowledge of these words is probably based on and is a weaker version of the knowledge of the adults. The 4th grade students acceptance results (see Table 1.) are very close to the adult’s and (opposed to adults) they also accept expressions much faster than rejecting them which suggests that they are much more confident when accepting a word based on familiarity, but have trouble rejecting them, because they do not have a personal knowledge based on which they could judge their existence. The children’s knowledge is probably based on hearing these words in adult conversation, but they are not active users of the slang expressions or are targets of utterances containing them. This way they might have an idea about the meaning of these words, but they cannot interpret them in every situation. 4th grade (%) Universit y students (%) Total (%) felkattanYes43,4767,548,44 (clicks on) No 56,5232,551,54 kikattanYes56,529069,67 (clicks out) No43,431030,31 kirágYes65,218073,40 (chews out) No 34,782026,59 kizúgYes47,825046,14 (falls out) No 52,175053,84 lehalYes27,273025,34 (dies down) No 72,727074,65 lekattanYes43,477551,99 (clicks down) No 56,522548 rázúgYes47,823535,94 (buzzes on) No 52,176564,05 Table 1. 4th grade and university student's acacceptance and rejection of the novel words. Table 2. 4th grade students knowledge about the meaning of the slang words Figure 1. Reaction times of the university students. Significant speed-up in the synonym and slow-down in the opposite condition. Figure 2.: reaction times of the 4th grade students. Significant speed-up in the synonym condition. * *** The results discussed above are supported by the grant TÁMOP-4.2.2/B-10/1-2010-0009.