Abstract

A substantial number of school children and youngsters encounters problems with the production of written texts in an autonomous fashion. Although the reasons for this phenomenon are various, it will hereby be focused on the development of the oral language occurring during the school age; that is, from six years of age on. In particular, this study will refer to certain forms of non-literal language: indirect speech acts and ironies. Theoretically, the writing/oral comprehension of non-literal language connection is based on their seeming relationship with the development of a metalinguistic conscience and a theory of the mind. Empirically, this study involves the participation of 141 13-14-year-old students whose oral comprehension was measured by the Instrument for the Measurement of Pragmatic Inferences (IMIP, according to the Spanish acronym), and writing, by an Analytic Assessment Guide. Data were analyzed with the aid of canonical co-relation and the results reveal, on the one hand, a moderate degree of association in the observable oral and writing variables among themselves and, on the other, a low but significant degree of canonical co-relation between the latent oral and writing variables (Rc = 0, 26, p < 0.05), where the former would seem a factor variable and the latter, a criterion variable. The conclusion is that, even though the development of oral comprehension of non-literal language seems to influence writing abilities, such a co-relation is not strong enough to look at it as having practical significance.