Idiom Understanding in Preadolescents: Synergy in Action

The present study was designed to examine how preadolescents gain an understanding of idioms. In particular, it examined the role of idiom familiarity in conjunction with students’ language-based academic abilities. The participants were 50 children (mean age 12 years 4 months) who attended a primary school in Christchurch, New Zealand. All students spoke standard New Zealand English and were considered by the school to be progressing normally. The results indicated that idiom understanding was closely associated with students’ familiarity with idioms and with their skills in reading and listening comprehension. Moreover, students who were good comprehenders of idioms outperformed their classmates who were poor comprehenders on all associated measures: idiom familiarity, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension. Guidelines for instruction in idiom understanding are offered for speech-language pathologists who work collaboratively with teachers in the regular classroom during language arts activities. The guidelines reflect the position that multiple factors, working in synergy, promote the understanding of idioms in youth.

Increases in Intrusion Errors and Working Memory Deficit of Poor Comprehenders

This study tests the hypothesis that the ability to inhibit already processed and actually irrelevant information could influence performance in the listening span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) and have a crucial role in reading comprehension. In two experiments, the listening span test and a new working memory test were given to two groups of young adults, poor and good comprehenders, matched for logical reasoning ability. In Experiment 1, the poor comprehenders had a significantly lower performance in the listening span test associated to a higher number of intrusions—that is, recalled words that, in spite of being in sentence form, were not placed in the last position. In Experiment 2, a new working memory test was devised in order to analyse more effectively the occurrence of intrusions. Subjects were required to listen to a growing series of strings of animal and non-animal words. Whilst listening, they had to detect when an animal word occurred, and at the end of each series they had to recall the last word of each string. The poor comprehenders obtained a significantly lower performance in the memory task and made a higher number of intrusions, particularly of animal words.

Information-Processing Differences of College-Age Readers Differing in Reading Comprehension and Speed

The present study examined information-processing differences among four types of readers, specifically high comprehension–high speed, high comprehension–low speed, low comprehension–high speed, and low comprehension–low speed college-age readers. Performance was compared on a variety of information-processing tasks, including letter reordering, word reordering, reading span, verification of real words and nonwords, and verification of real sentences and nonsense sentences. Tasks were categorized as lower order tasks involving reaction time and/or elementary-word tasks, or higher order tasks requiring access of word meanings or semantic decision-making. Results indicated that good comprehenders tended to outperform poor comprehenders on all types of tasks. Although high-and low-speed readers performed differentially on some tasks, the pattern of results is less clear. Performance on tasks was discussed in light of speed and comprehension variables and type of information-processing task. Differences in working memory were proposed as a source of individual differences in reading performance.