Many hands on this study: Development of a metonymy comprehension task

ABSTRACT Metonymy is a pervasive linguistic/cognitive mechanism in everyday language. Still, studies assessing its comprehension are rare the literature. Our goal to present elaboration of verbal metonymy task Brazilian Portuguese as well test it using pilot studies. The was based on cognitive linguistics framework and psychometric guidelines were considered. construction considered psycholinguistic variables included conventionality an expert analysis. Three (N = 290, ages ranging 2 54 years old) conducted until we reached final version. study resulted composed one practice item six items. Each includes sentence-stimulus two questions (one open-ended closed-ended). Together, items make up raw score that represents comprehension. Data obtained from show improves gradually with age there significant difference between both types questions. This consonance literature, thus points towards instrument’s construct validity. results presents enough sensitivity gauge this phenomenon at different ages.