An interesting article, though I don't think this bit is entirely accurate:
> because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally.
It's not about hearing things 'literally', but it's that children are less adept than (some) adults in dealing with the polysemy inherent in natural language, and especially in navigating polysemy based on context. The example they provide is a good case in point:
> For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
So blow up meaning "explode" isn't any more 'literal' an interpretation than blow up meaning "to inflate". In fact, if anything, the latter is the more literal interpretation. But the point is that blow up is polysemous, and the "explode" sense is common enough that children might take that to be the primary sense and (especially) younger ones might not be able to use the immediate context (nurse with a blood pressure cuff) to discard that sense as unlikely.
> because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally.
It's not about hearing things 'literally', but it's that children are less adept than (some) adults in dealing with the polysemy inherent in natural language, and especially in navigating polysemy based on context. The example they provide is a good case in point:
> For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
So blow up meaning "explode" isn't any more 'literal' an interpretation than blow up meaning "to inflate". In fact, if anything, the latter is the more literal interpretation. But the point is that blow up is polysemous, and the "explode" sense is common enough that children might take that to be the primary sense and (especially) younger ones might not be able to use the immediate context (nurse with a blood pressure cuff) to discard that sense as unlikely.