This study investigated the ability of college freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, in a predominantly Black college, to interpret metaphorical language and to differentiate their abilities in the interpretation of six types of tropes: Litotes, personification, synecdoche, hyperbole, metonymy and incarnation. / The data were acquired from 400 responses for 98 freshmen, 101 sophomores, 104 juniors and 97 seniors at Albany State College on the Revised Tullos Test of Metaphorical Language Interpretation. The respondents reacted to 72 multiple-choice items. / According to F-tests in one-way analysis of variance there were significant differences between the total score means for freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, and also for each of the six tropes. / Analysis comparing contiguous sub-group means by the Scheffe's Procedure of Multiple Range Comparison and the S-method of Multiple Comparisons, disclosed that the development of metaphorical language interpretation skills did not improve significantly from year-to-year during the college experiences except during the freshman and sophomore years. From the end of the sophomore college year, no significant improvement was further noticed among juniors and seniors. The researcher's subsequent hypotheses is that the cresting of metaphorical language interpretation skills at the end of the sophomore year and its lack of further improvement in the junior and senior college years may be due to the absence of required English fundamentals courses in the junior and senior years. / In addition to the primary concerns, this study sought to determine which of the six tropes proved to be difficult for each of the four sub-groups of subjects. This was determined by comparing z scores means within each of the subgroups (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors). It was found that: (1) Freshmen most often failed to interpret correctly the personification trope. (2) Sophomores most often failed to interpret correctly the incarnation trope. (3) Juniors most often failed to interpret correctly the trope personification. (4) Seniors most often failed to interpret correctly the metonymy trope. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-10, Section: A, page: 3248. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74956 |
| Contributors | TIFT, ROSA M., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 106 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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