Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T20:31:35.570Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A longitudinal study of idiom and text comprehension*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2007

M. CHIARA LEVORATO ,
MAJA ROCH  and
BARBARA NESI
M. CHIARA LEVORATO*
Affiliation:
University of Padova, Italy
MAJA ROCH
Affiliation:
University of Padova, Italy
BARBARA NESI
Affiliation:
University of Padova, Italy
*
Address for correspondence: M. C. Levorato, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Via Venezia, 8, 35131 Padova, Italy. e-mail: chiara.levorato@unipd.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related to idiom comprehension than sentence comprehension. The follow-up study, carried out eight months later on less-skilled text comprehenders, investigated whether an improvement in text comprehension was paralleled by an improvement in idiom comprehension. The development of sentence comprehension was also taken into account. Children who improved in text comprehension also improved in idiom comprehension; this improvement was, instead, weakly related to an improvement in sentence comprehension. The relationship between text and idiom comprehension is discussed in the light of the Global Elaboration Model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2007 , pp. 473 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abkarian, G. G., Jones, A. & West, G. (1992). Young children's idiom comprehension: Trying to get the picture. Journal of Speech & Hearing Research 35, 580–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ackerman, B. P. (1982). On comprehending idioms: Do the children get the picture? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 33, 439–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barton, S. B. & Sanford, A. J. (1993). A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment. Memory & Cognition 21, 477–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bishop, D. V. (1989). Test for Reception Grammar, 2nd ed. Manchester, UK: Age and Cognitive Performance Research Centre, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Bowey, J. A. & Patel, R. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics 9, 367–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacciari, C. & Levorato, M. C. (1989). How children understand idioms in discourse. Journal of Child Language 16, 387–405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cacciari, C. & Levorato, M. C. (1998). The effect of semantic analysability of idioms in metalinguistic tasks. Metaphor and Symbol 13, 159–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cain, K. & Oakhill, J. (1999). Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children. Reading and Writing 11, 489–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cain, K., Oakhill, J., Barnes, M. A. & Bryant, P. E. (2001). Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and the relation to knowledge. Memory & Cognition 29, 850–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cain, K., Oakhill, J. & Lemmon, K. (2005). The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 90, 65–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cornoldi, C. & Colpo, G. (1998). Prove di lettura MT per la scuola elementare [MT Reading Task for Elementary School]. Firenze: Organizzazioni Speciali.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (1987). Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms. Journal of Child Language 14, 569–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. W. (1991). Semantic analysability in children's understanding of idioms. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 34, 613–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenfield Spira, E., Storch Bracken, S. & Fischel, J. E. (2005). Predicting improvement after first-grade reading difficulties: The effects of oral language, emergent literacy, and behavior skills. Developmental Psychology 41, 225–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, J. L. & Gibbs, R. W. (1999). Why you can't kick the bucket as you slowly die: Verbs in idiom comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28(1), 25–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannon, B. & Daneman, M. (2001). A new tool for measuring and understanding individual differences in the component processes of reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology 93(1), 103–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Levorato, M. C. (1993). The acquisition of idioms and the development of Figurative Competence. In Cacciari, C. & Tabossi, P. (eds), Idioms: Processing, structure and interpretation 105–128. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Levorato, M. C. & Cacciari, C. (1992). Children's comprehension and production of idioms: The role of context and familiarity. Journal of Child Language 19, 415–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levorato, M. C. & Cacciari, C. (1995). The effects of different tasks on the comprehension and production of idioms in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 60, 261–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levorato, M. C. & Cacciari, C. (1999). Idiom comprehension in children: Are the effects of semantic analysability and context separable? European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 11(1), 51–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levorato, M. C., Nesi, B. & Cacciari, C. (2004). Reading comprehension and understanding idioms: A developmental study. Brain and Language 202, 4–16.Google Scholar
Lodge, L. & Leach, E. (1975). Children's acquisition of idioms in the English language. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 18, 521–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Long, D. L. & Chong, J. L. (2001). Comprehension skill and global coherence: A paradoxical picture of poor comprehenders' abilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 27, 1424–9.Google ScholarPubMed
Nation, K. & Snowling, M. J. (1998). Individual differences in contextual facilitation: Evidence from dyslexia and poor reading comprehension. Child Development 69, 996–1011.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nesi, B., Levorato, M. C., Roch, M. & Cacciari, C. (2006). To break the embarrassment. Text comprehension skills and figurative competence in skilled and less-skilled comprehenders. European Psychologist 11(2), 128–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nippold, M., Moran, C. & Schwarz, I. E. (2001). Idiom understanding in preadolescents: Synergy in action. American Journal of Speech and Language Pathology 10(2), 169–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nippold, M. A. & Rudzinski, M. (1993). Familiarity and transparency in idiom explanation: A developmental study of children and adolescents. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 728–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nippold, M. A. & Taylor, C. L. (2002). Judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency: A comparison of children and adolescents. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 45, 384–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norbury, C. F. (2004). Factors supporting idiom comprehension in children with communication disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, 1179–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oakhill, J. & Yuill, N. (1996). Higher order factors in comprehension disability: Processes and remediation. In Cornoldi, C. & Oakhill, J. (eds), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention, 69–92. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Otero, J. & Kintsch, W. (1992). Failures to detect contradictions in a text: What readers believe versus what they read. Psychological Science 3, 229–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palladino, P., De Beni, R. & Cornoldi, C. (1995). L'evoluzione delle difficoltà specifiche di comprensione del testo: uno studio longitudinale. [The evolution of specific difficulties in text comprehension: A longitudinal study.] Archivio di Psicologia, Neurologia e Psichiatria 56(5–6), 548–64.Google Scholar
Papagno, C. & Genoni, A. (2004). The role of syntactic competence in idiom comprehension: A study on aphasic patients. Journal of Neurolinguistics 17(5), 371–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, R., Burgess, C., Dell, G. S. & Eberhard, K. M. (2001). Dissociation between syntactic and semantic processing during idiom comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27, 1223–37.Google ScholarPubMed
Pittano, G. (1992). Frase fatta capo ha. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar
Rustioni Metz Lancaster, D. (1994). Prove di valutazione della comprensione linguistica [Evaluation of language comprehension]. Firenze: Organizzazioni Speciali.Google Scholar
Savage, R. (2001). The ‘simple view’ of reading: Some evidence and possible implications. Educational Psychology in Practice 17(1), 17–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stothard, S. E. & Hulme, C. (1992). Reading comprehension difficulties in children: The role of language comprehension and working memory skills. Reading and Writing 4, 245–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willows, D. W. & Ryan, E. (1986). The development of grammatical sensitivity and its relationship to early reading achievement. Reading Research Quarterly 21, 253–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar