Peculiarities of Children's Understanding of the Figurative Meaning of Phrases and their Use in Spontaneous Speech: The relevant a State of Development

The aim of the research was to study psycholinguistic features of children's development of operations of understanding figurative meaning of phraseological expressions and their verbalization in speech. To this end we used methods of assessing the understanding of figurative meaning of proverbs and metaphors, direct interpretation of a word, choosing one variant of meaning from several paraphrases, interviewing children, recording their statements on dictaphone, and talking to children. The analysis of children's speech was carried out according to the criteria and corresponding indicators: semantic (lexical, metaphorical, conceptual), pragmatic (active use of phrases, correct reproduction, appropriateness of actualization), expressive-stylistic (evaluative, emotional, figurative speech). Four levels of children's operations of understanding figurative meaning of phraseological expressions and their use in speech were identified: high, sufficient, average, low, each of which correlated with certain psychological and psycholinguistic characteristics