title: Reading comprehension and understanding idiomatic expressions: a developmental study.
abstract: The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1998) to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., "break the ice"). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted children's understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in children's comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Padova, Italy. chiara.levorato@unipd.it
authors.forename: Maria Chiara
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Levorato
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nesi
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cacciari
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013561:Symbolism