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PubMed1996

Proverb comprehension in youth: the role of concreteness and familiarity.

This study examined factors that were posited to play an important role in the development of proverb comprehension in school-age children and adolescents, namely, the concreteness and the familiarity of the expressions. Normally achieving students enrolled in Grades 5, 8, and 11 (n = 180) were administered a written forced-choice task that contained eight instances of four different types of proverbs: concrete-familiar ("A rolling stone gathers no moss"); concrete-unfamiliar ("A caged bird longs for the clouds"); abstract-familiar ("Two wrongs don't make a right"); and abstract-unfamiliar ("Of idleness comes no goodness"). Performance on the task steadily improved as a function of increasing grade level and, as predicted, the expressions proved to be differentially challenging: Concrete proverbs were easier to understand than abstract proverbs, and familiar proverbs were easier to understand than unfamiliar proverbs. The results concerning concreteness support the "metasemantic" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through active analysis of the words contained in proverbs. The results concerning familiarity support the "language experience" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through meaningful exposure to proverbs.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

[The attitude and behavior toward superstitions and proverbs].

Two hypotheses were developed: 1) People who have experienced many misfortune and calamities believe in superstitions and proverbs and often practise them as compared to those with few or no such experience; and 2) university students' attitude and behavior toward superstitions and proverbs are related to those of their parents. One hundred and three students and their 103 parents (father or mother) were asked to indicate: 1) their attitude and practice regarding each of 42 superstitions and proverbs; 2) past visits to fortunetellers and exorcism rites; and 3) past experience of misfortune and calamities. People with experience of misfortune and calamities had a higher ratio than those without such experience only in "visits to fortunetellers and exorcism rites." There was no such trend in the 42 superstitions and proverbs. There was a close parent-child relation in the attitude toward superstitions. A similar relation was observed in superstitious practice in family life. However, no parent-child relationship was found for the proverb-related attitude and behavior.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

[Development of a proverb test for assessment of concrete thinking problems in schizophrenic patients].

Concretism is considered an important aspect of schizophrenic thought disorder. Traditionally it is measured using the method of proverb interpretation, in which metaphoric proverbs are presented with the request that the subject tell its meaning. Interpretations are recorded and scored on concretistic tendencies. However, this method has two problems: its reliability is doubtful and it is rather complicated to perform. In this paper, a new version of a multiple choice proverb test is presented which can solve these problems in a reliable and economic manner. Using the new test, it is has been shown that schizophrenic patients have greater deficits in proverb interpretation than depressive patients.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Electrophysiological and behavioral measures of the influence of literal and figurative contextual constraints on proverb comprehension.

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.

Aphorisms and Proverbs as Topic↗
PubMed1994

Spare the rod and spoil the child. Is this a sensible justification for the use of punishment in child rearing?

This paper examines the validity of the well-used proverb Spare the rod and spoil the child. To do this, the original form of the proverb from the Bible is compared with the modern form, and some significant differences are highlighted. The definition of punishment is considered, and the differences between punishment and corporal punishment are examined. Punishment is explored in some detail with attention given to the criteria that need to be satisfied in order for punishment to be effective. Discrepancies in the literature concerning these criteria are pointed out, making punishment a complex issue. The negative effects of punishment are significant with links to social problems such as teenage delinquency and violence. Reference is made to cultures where corporal punishment has been banned and the effects of this action. Given the problems associated with punishment programs, especially those being used in families, alternatives to punishment are discussed. Finally, an alternative form of the proverb to the current adaptation is offered.

Adolescent↗