A play‐based procedure for assessing idiom comprehension in children with semantic‐pragmatic difficulties

Abstract

ABSTRACT In response to the lack of suitable materials for assessing idiom comprehension in children with semantic‐pragmatic difficulties, a new play‐based methodology has been developed. The child listens to a tape‐recorded story into which are embedded a range of commonly used idiomatic expressions. After listening to the story once, the child then acts out the story as it is played again, sentence by sentence. The play is video‐recorded and transcribed. Actions for each idiom are categorised and are then amenable to within‐child, between‐child and between‐group analyses. The results of a pilot project indicate that this methodology overcomes many of the problems inherent in assessing children identified as having semantic‐pragmatic difficulties. As such, the play‐based methodology represents a more accurate tool than existing methodologies for assessing idiomatic comprehension for the purposes of diagnosis, therapy and research. The gathering of valid information regarding idiom comprehension in children with sematic‐pragmatic difficulties is particularly relevant in view of the widespread use of idioms to which children are exposed in daily life. Boatner and Gates (1969) claim that as much as two‐thirds of the English language comprises idiomatic expressions. Research indicates that more than one in 10 teacher utterances contains at least one idiom (Lazar et al., 1989). The high level of idiomatic usage among primary school teachers was confirmed in recordings of routine lessons conducted for this research in mainstream and language unit classes. The idioms used in the play‐based procedure are drawn from these teacher recordings as well as from children's television. The play‐based methodology affords the opportunity to investigate the ability of individual children to cope with the types of idioms to which they are commonly exposed. Additionally, it enables an investigation of the appropriacy of using over‐literal idiom interpretation as a diagnostic feature of semantic‐pragmatic difficulties. Conducting this procedure with different groups of children further allows for the controversial relationships between semantic‐pragmatic difficulties and autism, and semantic‐pragmatic difficulties and specific language impairment, respectively, to be probed. In addition to its value in assessing idiom comprehension, the play‐based procedure has further potential for assessing children's comprehension of, for example, phonemic distinctions and syntactic constructions. This procedure is particularly valuable for use with children in that it requires the child to engage in an intrinsically rewarding task which does not allow the child to fail.