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…

An experiment was designed to answer the following: (1) can children as young as 2 1/2 to 3 years of age employ contextual cues in order to distinguish request from offers? and (2) do children's discrimination skills for these illocutionary acts improve with age? A model of the comprehension of illocutionary force is proposed. (Author/AM)

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)