Children's idiom comprehension is an important aspect of language development. Idioms have both literal and figurative meanings, and there are often great differences between literal meaning and figurative meaning, which brings great difficulties to children's accurate understanding of idioms. As a kind of underlying language ability,…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

This article reports a study in which good and poor comprehenders (in 2 age groups: 8- and 10-year-olds) read short passages containing phrases that could be interpreted as idiomatic or not, depending on the context. Familiarity was manipulated by including real (English) idioms and novel (translations of Italian) idioms. Reading times for the…

Cultural sensitivity and responsiveness are being advocated in reading assessments to reduce the impact of community speech patterns (CSP) on the accuracy of miscue analysis. This study, motivated by a high incidence of retention in 1st grade in a local school district, investigated whether CSP among students affected reading outcomes and…

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…

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the…