To break the….embarrassment: Text Comprehension Skills and Figurative Competence in skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders

The aim of the present study was to investigate children’s ability to complete idiom fragments embedded in stories. Previous studies found that children’s and preadolescents’ ability to comprehend a text was related to their ability to understand an idiomatic expression (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2005; Levorato, Nesi, & Cacciari, 2004; Nippold, Moran, & Schwarz, 2001). Comprehension and production processes share a vast amount of conceptual and lexical knowledge. Hence, we hypothesized that children’s text reading comprehension skills also might be related to their ability to produce nonliteral completions. Skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders (age range from 7.4 to 10.3) were presented with short stories that ended with an idiomatic fragment (e.g., “Paul broke the . . .” for the idiom “break the ice”) and were asked to complete the story. The children’s completions were coded as Literal, Idiomatic, or Figurative, as in previous studies (Levorato & Cacciari, 1992, 1995). The results showed that children’s ability to understand a text was related to their ability to complete idiomatic fragments figuratively. Less-skilled comprehenders provided more literal completions than skilled comprehenders who, in turn, provided more idiomatic completions.