No abstract

School-age children and adolescents ( n = 150) enrolled in Grades 5, 8, and 11 were administered a forced choice task of idiom understanding that controlled for idiom familiarity and transparency. Performance on the task steadily improved during the targeted age range and was affected by the factors of interest: Idioms that were higher in familiarity and transparency were easier for students to understand than those that were less familiar and more opaque. The results of this study provide further support for the language experience hypothesis of figurative language development and for the hypothesis that metalinguistic activity, which itself becomes more sophisticated during the school-age and adolescent years, facilitates later language development. The study also suggests certain methodological implications for future research that examines the development of idiom understanding in youth.

Idiom interpretation under two different presentation modes, Isolation and Context, was examined developmentally in 475 adolescents ages 14 through 17. Results demonstrated that accuracy was greater for idioms in Context than idioms in Isolation, and that accuracy for both presentation modes slowly improved during the target age range. However, even the oldest subjects had not yet mastered the task in either mode. Qualitative analysis indicated that No Response, Literal, and Unrelated error types were produced most often by the youngest subjects but tended to decrease as subject age increased. In general, more No Response, Literal, Related, and Unrelated error types were produced for idioms in Isolation than in Context, but more Restatement errors were produced for idioms in Context. It was also found that idiom interpretation was significantly correlated to specific measures of literacy in 16-year-olds.

A picture-naming task was used to examine word-finding problems in language-impaired children. The subjects included 20 language-impaired children, 20 normal children matched to the language-impaired children for chronological age, and 20 normal children matched to the language-impaired children on a composite index of language age. Children were shown 64 pictures of objects and asked to name each as rapidly as possible. The principal findings were that (a) pictures of objects with more frequently occurring names were named more rapidly than pictures of objects with less frequently occurring names; (b) language-impaired children named pictures less rapidly than their chronological-age peers but more rapidly than their language-age peers; and (c) the effects of frequency of occurrence on naming time were comparable for all three groups of children. Factors that may have accounted for the findings are discussed.

Speech-language pathologists may wish to employ expository discourse tasks rather than conversational tasks to examine syntactic development in adolescents.