Purpose: This study was designed primarily to determine if a critical-thinking task involving fables would elicit greater syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents. Another purpose was to determine how well adolescents understand critical-thinking questions about fables. Method: Forty adolescents (N = 20 boys and 20 girls;…

The development of mental imagery in relation to the comprehension of concrete proverbs (e.g., "one rotten apple spoils the barrel") was examined in children, adolescents, and adults who were ages 11 to 29 years old (n = 210). The findings indicated that age-related changes occurred in mental imagery and in proverb comprehension during the years…

Adolescents and young adults (n=120) were assessed on their use and understanding of concordant and discordant adverbial conjuncts. Results demonstrated an increasing ability with age to use and understand these words in the written mode, with mastery in usage trailing understanding. Concordant and discordant conjuncts were equally difficult.…

A review of developmental studies concerning metaphor, idiom, and proverb comprehension suggest a variety of assessment tasks for language impaired children. Also suggested are such intervention considerations as the comprehension of literal meaning of figurative expressions before nonliteral meanings. (CL)

The study with 30 five-year-olds and 30 seven-year-olds demonstrated that children as young as five have an emerging ability to solve both verbal and perceptual proportional analogy problems and to detect the meaning of proportional metaphoric sentences. (Author/DB)

Guidelines are offered for speech-language pathologists who seek to evaluate and enhance idiom comprehension in language-disordered students. The long-term goal of the treatment approach is for the student to acquire a specific comprehension strategy for determining the meanings of unfamiliar idioms. (Author/JDD)

Proverb comprehension through reading was examined in 42 preadolescent students, 24 of whom were identified as "proficient readers," and 18 as "less proficient readers." Comprehension on both unfamiliar concrete and abstract proverbs was associated with reading proficiency, word knowledge, and analogical reasoning. (Contains references.)…

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

A study of 240 students in grades 4-10 found that fourth graders performed well on a proverb comprehension task involving contextual information, refuting earlier findings that preadolescents interpret proverbs literally. Performance was found to improve steadily through grade eight and was correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical…

Idiom interpretation under two different presentation modes, Isolation and Context, was examined developmentally in 475 adolescents ages 14 through 17. Accuracy was greater for idioms in context than in isolation and improved during the age range. Idiom interpretation was significantly correlated to specific measures of literacy. (Author/DB)

Elementary and secondary students (N=150) were given a forced-choice task of idiom understanding. Performance on tasks steadily improved with age, and idioms with higher familiarity and transparency were easier for students to understand. Results support the language experience model of figurative language development and the hypothesis that…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…

Comparison of the comprehension of proverbs of 200 students (50 each in Grades 6, 8, 10, and 12) found growth in proverb comprehension was most pronounced at two transitional points in development: when students move from late childhood into early adolescence, and again when they move from late adolescence into adulthood. Implications for…

Twenty children, aged six-eight, with normal nonverbal intelligence but language comprehension deficits, were administered tasks of verbal and perceptual proportional analogical reasoning and a problem-solving task of functional analogical reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects were deficient in analogical reasoning. However, when the…