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Part of
Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 113–126

Idiom understanding competence of Spanish children with Specific Language Impairment and Pragmatic Language Impairment

| Universitat Jaume I
| Universitat Jaume I

Children with pragmatic language impairment (PLI) have problems understanding idioms. However, whether similar difficulties are present in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and which cognitive and linguistic factors are implied, is still not fully addressed. In this chapter the competence to understand idioms in Spanish children with SLI and PLI is compared to a typically developing group, using a verbal and a visual condition. Visual idioms challenged both children with SLI and PLI, but verbal indioms only challenged children with PLI. Also, their performance was related to their grammar and pragmatics skills, but not to the vocabulary ones. However, only children with PLI improved their competence on the visual condition. Practical implications for diagnosing and designing interventions are discussed.

Keywords: idioms, Specific Language Impairment (SLI), Pragmatic Language Impairment (PLI), pragmatics, figurative language, Social Communication Disorder (SCD)
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Figurative language and idiom understanding
    • Idiom understanding in children with SLI and PLI
    • Aims and hypothesis
  • Methodology
    • Participants
  • Materials
    • Language measures
    • Idiom understanding tasks
      • a.Verbal condition
    • Visual condition
    • Procedure
  • Results
    • I. Between-group comparisons on key and related measures
    • II. Within-group comparisons between verbal and visual conditions
    • III. Correlations between idiom understanding (verbal condition) and language measures
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 11 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.07and
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