11
JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS TEACHING IDIOM COMPREHENSION TO CHILDREN WITH MENTAL RETARDATION HEN K. EzaL AiND HOWARD GoDsTEmi UNIVRSITY OF PI'ISBURGH This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to teach children with mild mental retardation the meaning of 12 idiomatic phrases, such as "to hit the sack." Four 9-year- old children participated in the training. A multiple baseline design across subjects and across three sets of idioms was implemented. Training consisted of presenting both literal and idiomatic contexts in the form of story narratives, and asking the children to explain the outcome of the story and to select one picture from an array of four that represented the outcome. All children demonstrated learning, although 1 child required review procedures to facilitate maintenance. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. All children demonstrated an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts. DESCRIPTORS: language training, idiom comprehension, mentally retarded children The use of idioms in our everyday speech is so frequent that most of us are unaware that we use them. Seidl and McMordie (1978) define an idiom as ". . . a number of words which, taken together, mean something different from the individual words of the idiom when they stand alone" (p. 4). One example of an idiom is the phrase "to hit the books," which means to study hard. Idioms are found in all languages and across all modes of communication. Those who have studied a foreign language and then tried to use their textbook lan- guage with native speakers realize that literal knowledge of a language does not always result in effective communication. It is the idiom that pro- vides us with a familiar and contemporary form of expression. Research suggests that many young children do not understand most idioms. Lodge and Leach (1975) found that idiom comprehension in normal Helen K. Ezell is currently affiliated with the Early Child- hood Intervention Program at Allegheny-Singer Research In- stitute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Jennifer Jones in the data collection of this study. Interested readers may obtain a sample of the pictures from the first author. Support for this research has been provided by the U.S. Department of Education Grant H023B80003 to the University of Pittsburgh. Requests for reprints should be sent to Helen K. Ezell, Early Childhood Intervention Program, Allegheny-Singer Re- search Institute, 320 E. North Avenue, Pittsburgh, Penn- sylvania 15212. children generally does not emerge until 9 to 12 years of age; at these ages, children demonstrated 20% to 50% comprehension accuracy. More re- cently, Prinz (1983) found that comprehension ac- curacy may be somewhat higher at these ages; 9-year-olds comprehended with 50% accuracy, whereas 12-year-olds scored 80%. However, chil- dren's verbal explanations of idiomatic meaning lagged behind the comprehension scores for each group (20% and 35%, respectively). Recently, Ezell and Goldstein (199 la) compared idiom comprehension skills of typical children with those exhibiting mental retardation. The 9-year- old typical children scored 67% accuracy compared to those with mental retardation, who scored 17% accuracy. A younger group of typical children (mean chronological age of 6 years) scored only 9% ac- curacy. As one might expect, these findings indicate that children with mental retardation lag behind their typical peers in comprehending idioms. How- ever, the fact that they outperformed their younger counterparts suggests that they may benefit from additional exposure to idiom use. Children with mental retardation who fail to comprehend common idioms may be confronted with comprehension difficulties on a regular basis, particularly in school. These children now receive some or all of their schooling in regular dassrooms where they are exposed to the idiomatic language of teachers and peers. Lazar, Warr-Leeper, Nich- 181 1992. 259 181-191 NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1992)

Teaching idiom comprehension to children with mental retardation

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JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

TEACHING IDIOM COMPREHENSION TO CHILDREN WITHMENTAL RETARDATION

HEN K. EzaL AiND HOWARD GoDsTEmiUNIVRSITY OF PI'ISBURGH

This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to teach children with mildmental retardation the meaning of 12 idiomatic phrases, such as "to hit the sack." Four 9-year-old children participated in the training. A multiple baseline design across subjects and across threesets of idioms was implemented. Training consisted of presenting both literal and idiomatic contextsin the form of story narratives, and asking the children to explain the outcome of the story and toselect one picture from an array of four that represented the outcome. All children demonstratedlearning, although 1 child required review procedures to facilitate maintenance. Children were ableto generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. All childrendemonstrated an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts.DESCRIPTORS: language training, idiom comprehension, mentally retarded children

The use of idioms in our everyday speech is sofrequent that most of us are unaware that we usethem. Seidl and McMordie (1978) define an idiomas ". . . a number of words which, taken together,mean something different from the individual wordsof the idiom when they stand alone" (p. 4). Oneexample of an idiom is the phrase "to hit thebooks," which means to study hard. Idioms arefound in all languages and across all modes ofcommunication. Those who have studied a foreignlanguage and then tried to use their textbook lan-guage with native speakers realize that literalknowledge of a language does not always result ineffective communication. It is the idiom that pro-vides us with a familiar and contemporary form ofexpression.

Research suggests that many young children donot understand most idioms. Lodge and Leach(1975) found that idiom comprehension in normal

Helen K. Ezell is currently affiliated with the Early Child-hood Intervention Program at Allegheny-Singer Research In-stitute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We gratefully acknowledgethe assistance of Jennifer Jones in the data collection of thisstudy. Interested readers may obtain a sample of the picturesfrom the first author. Support for this research has beenprovided by the U.S. Department of Education GrantH023B80003 to the University of Pittsburgh.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Helen K. Ezell,Early Childhood Intervention Program, Allegheny-Singer Re-search Institute, 320 E. North Avenue, Pittsburgh, Penn-sylvania 15212.

children generally does not emerge until 9 to 12years of age; at these ages, children demonstrated20% to 50% comprehension accuracy. More re-cently, Prinz (1983) found that comprehension ac-curacy may be somewhat higher at these ages;9-year-olds comprehended with 50% accuracy,whereas 12-year-olds scored 80%. However, chil-dren's verbal explanations of idiomatic meaninglagged behind the comprehension scores for eachgroup (20% and 35%, respectively).

Recently, Ezell and Goldstein (199 la) comparedidiom comprehension skills of typical children withthose exhibiting mental retardation. The 9-year-old typical children scored 67% accuracy comparedto those with mental retardation, who scored 17%accuracy. A younger group of typical children (meanchronological age of 6 years) scored only 9% ac-curacy. As one might expect, these findings indicatethat children with mental retardation lag behindtheir typical peers in comprehending idioms. How-ever, the fact that they outperformed their youngercounterparts suggests that they may benefit fromadditional exposure to idiom use.

Children with mental retardation who fail tocomprehend common idioms may be confrontedwith comprehension difficulties on a regular basis,particularly in school. These children now receivesome or all of their schooling in regular dassroomswhere they are exposed to the idiomatic languageof teachers and peers. Lazar, Warr-Leeper, Nich-

181

1992. 259 181-191 NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1992)

2HELEN K. EZELL and HOWARD GOLDSTEIN

Table 1Description of Subjects

Peabody pic voc test

Rec Stan. TOLD-I Idiom testName IQ Age voc age score EOWPVT SQ LQ I L

Andrew 63a 9-4 5-7 58 6-5 79 64 3 18Corey 79b 9-7 7-9 87 7-4 85 79 5 19James 78b 9-7 5-7 58 8-2 70 72 3 19Kelsey 75b 9-7 5-11 62 7-4 70 87 4 15

Note. Peabody pic voc test refers to the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Rec voc age refers to theReceptive Vocabulary Age, and Stan. score refers to the Standard Score Equivalent. EOWPVT refers to a mental age score on the ExpressiveOne-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Gardner, 1979). SQ represents a spoken language quotient and LQ represents a listening quotient onthe Test of Language Development-Intermediate (TOLD-I) (Hammill & Newcomer, 1988). Quotients are based on a mean equal to100 with a standard deviation of 15. Idiom test refers to the assessment of idiom comprehension. I represents the number of correctresponses to idiomatic contexts, and L represents the number of correct responses to literal contexts. Maximum score in each category is 20.

aStanford-Binet intelligence scale.bWechsler intelligence scale for children-revised (full scale) (Wechsler, 1974).

olson, and Johnson (1989) found that approxi-mately 11% of teachers' utterances, in kindergartenthrough Grade 8, contained idioms. Also, the useof idioms by teachers was found to increase withgrade level. The frequency with which idioms areused in the classroom poses a problem for childrenwith mental retardation who fail to understandthese nonliteral forms.One factor enhancing comprehension of idioms

includes the use of a supporting context. Severalinvestigations have used supporting contexts whenassessing children's idiom comprehension (Acker-man, 1982; Brinton, Fujiki, & Mackey, 1985;Douglas & Peel, 1979; Ezell & Goldstein, 199 la).Gibbs (1987) and Nippold and Martin (1989)compared idiom comprehension when presentedalone or with an accompanying context and foundincreased comprehension in the context condition.Also, Cacciari and Levorato (1989) demonstratedsimilar findings with Italian idioms.

Ezell and Goldstein (1991b) used supportingcontexts in an intervention designed to teach chil-dren with mental retardation the meaning ofidiomsthrough their requests for clarification. Althoughthese children learned to request clarification ofthree different types of inadequate instructions, nonelearned to request darification of instructions con-taining unknown idioms. This difficulty in detectingidioms based on context alone suggests that moredirect training in idiom comprehension seems to benecessary for children with mental retardation.

METHOD

SubjectsTwo boys and 2 girls, aged 9 years, participated

as subjects. All children were native speakers ofEnglish. The two girls, Corey and Kelsey, wereidentical twins. According to school records, thechildren exhibited a diagnosis of mild (IQs of 63to 79) mental retardation. Table 1 details the testfindings at the outset of the study for each of thechildren. One of the children, James, was retestedby the school psychologist near the end of this studyupon recommendation by the dassroom teacher.He scored an IQ of 89 (based on the Stanford-Binet Revised, Terman & Merrill, 1973) at thattime. All children received academic instruction ina special education classroom located in a schoolfor normal children.To ensure that the children had sufficient pre-

requisite skills to participate in an assessment oftheir idiom comprehension and to benefit from thetraining, each child was required to meet the fol-lowing selection criteria:

1. Correct identification of eight or more com-mon action pictures of a possible 10 (e.g., "Thegirl is sweeping"). Pictures consisted of black-and-white line drawings and were presented four on apage, resembling the format of the idiom pictures.Children identified the pictures by pointing.

2. Correct responding to eight of 12 questionsinvolving an auditory processing task, adapted from

182

IDIOM COMPREHENSION

the Clinical Evaluation of Language Functions(Semel & Wiig, 1980). In this task, four narrativeswere read to the subject, and three questions re-garding the narrative were asked immediately af-terwards to assess auditory comprehension skills.

Written parental consent was obtained prior toscreening each child. Once the child met the selec-tion criteria, the child's consent also was obtainedbefore training was initiated.

StimuliGeneral description. Items used for testing and

training resembled the general format used by Lodgeand Leach (1975) and Prinz (1983); however, thefollowing modifications were made: (a) Six idiomswere used from the previous studies and 14 newones were added to double the number of idiomstested, (b) short narratives that provided a contextfor both the literal and idiomatic meanings weredeveloped, (c) the pictures were altered to depictdifferent situations, and (d) all pictures were re-drawn to facilitate visual interpretation. Criteria forselecting the idioms induded dual interpretationand ease of visual depiction.

Picture representations for each item includedthe idiomatic meaning, the literal meaning, an id-iomatic variation, and a literal variation. For ex-ample, to test the meaning of "to wet his whistle,"the four pictures included a man taking a drink(idiomatic representation), a man dipping a whistlein water (literal representation), a man sitting on acouch talking (idiomatic variation), and a manblowing a whistle (literal variation). The purposeof the two variations was to present plausible foilsas well as to decrease the rate of chance responding.Pictures were arranged so that the location of thecorrect picture varied with each item.

Pilot assessment. To ensure that the pictureswere easily interpreted and the narratives could becomprehended without being highly predictable,stimuli were assessed with normal children, adults,and children with mental retardation. Revisionswere made of both the contexts and the picturestimuli following each round of assessment.

Test and training stimuli. Test stimuli con-tained 20 idioms presented through both literaland idiomatic contexts. The training stimuli were

the same as the test stimuli except that the childrenwere trained with only 12 of the available 20 id-ioms. The idiomatic phrases averaged 3.6 wordsin length and were positioned at the end of eachnarrative. For example, the narrative presented forthe idiomatic interpretation of "to wet his whistle"was: "It was a hot day. Bill drove many hours tovisit a friend. When Bill arrived, his friend invitedhim in to wet his whistle." The narrative for itsliteral interpretation was: "Bill uses a wooden whis-de to call his dog. If the whistle gets too dry, itdoesn't work. So Bill has to wet his whistle."

Assessment and Item SelectionPrior to training in idiom comprehension, the

children were tested individually on their compre-hension of 20 idioms. This assessment consisted ofbrief narratives accompanied by four pictures. Nofeedback was provided regarding the accuracy ofthe child's pointing response; however, praise wasgiven for on-task performance following every fifthitem. The 20 idioms were presented twice: oncewith an idiomatic context and again with a literalcontext. See Table 1 for the findings of this as-sessment.

Twelve idioms were selected for idiomatic train-ing for each child, based on the assessment. Theidioms were randomly assigned to one of threetraining sets for each child. Two additional testingsessions were conducted to ensure that the children'sresponses remained consistent. Andrew, James, andKelsey did not respond correctly to the idiomaticcontext for the 12 idioms during assessment. Coreywas the only subject who demonstrated inconsistentresponding. Her response patterns suggested ran-dom responses or guesses, because she never re-sponded correctly to the same idiom twice. SeeTable 2 for each child's training items.

SettingAll training sessions were conducted in a quiet

room at the subjects' school. Each subject was trainedindividually while he or she was seated beside theexaminer at a table. Training sessions averaged 25min and were conducted 4 days per week.

183

HELEN K. EZELL and HOWARD GOLDSTEIN

Table 2Idiom Training Sets

Subject Set I Set 2 Set 3

Andrew Break the ice Hit the books Kick the bucketWet his whistle Pulled her leg Kill two birdsLet cat out of bag Sleep on it Keep ball rollingShoot the bull Bury the hatchet Pass the buck

Corey Break the ice Let cat out of bag Wet his whistleKick the bucket Break a record Keep ball rollingKill two birds Pass the buck Sleep on itDrop her a line Turn over new leaf Bury the hatchet

James Keep ball rolling Break the ice Kick the bucketSleep on it Hit the books Pulled her legBury the hatchet Wet his whistle Shoot the bullBring home bacon Kill two birds Drop her a line

Kelsey Break the ice Kill two birds Sleep on itHit the books Pulled her leg Bury the hatchetWet his whistle Let cat out of bag Break a recordKick the bucket Keep ball rolling Shoot the bull

Experimental DesignA multiple baseline design across subjects and

across three sets of idioms was used to determinethe effects of training. To prevent long histories ofincorrect responses during extended baselines, amultiple probe technique (Horner & Baer, 1978)was used. Thus, until training was initiated withall but the first subject, baseline assessments wereconducted only once per week.

Training ProceduresBaseline sessions consisted of the trainer placing

a page with four pictures in front of the subject.The trainer then read a narrative to the child andasked the child to point to the picture that corre-sponded to the story. Each idiom was presented inboth an idiomatic and a literal context for one trial,each in random order. No feedback was providedto the child as to response accuracy. Results of theassessment indicated that each subject understoodthe literal meanings of the phrases; consequently,literal training was not required.

Idiom training was conducted in two steps. Thefirst step of training consisted of three components.In the first component, the trainer introduced thefirst training session with a brief explanation of theterm "figure of speech," the use ofidioms as figures

of speech, and an example of the training proce-dures to be followed, using the idiom "to havecold feet." In the second component, the trainerexplained the meaning of each of the idioms, oneat a time, and asked the subject to point to thepicture that corresponded with this meaning. Afterselecting the correct picture, the subject repeatedthe explanation of the idiom to the trainer. Verbalexplanations given by the subjects were scored ac-cording to presence or absence of specific contentwords that were considered to be critical elementsof the explanations. For example, the meaning of"to let the cat out of the bag" was defined as "totell someone a secret." The content words that wereconsidered to be critical for this explanation were"tell secret." The trainer provided feedback to thesubject regarding the accuracy of his or her pictureselection and explanation of the idiom.

The idioms were presented within the idiomaticcontexts during the third component of the firsttraining step. The trainer read the idiomatic nar-rative while keeping the pictures face down on thetable. This was done to assist the subject in focusinghis or her attention on the narrative and to eliminatecues from the pictures that might help the subjectexplain the idiomatic meaning. The subject wasasked to explain the meaning ofthe idiomatic phrase.

184

IDIOM COMPREHENSION

The trainer then provided feedback regarding theaccuracy of the explanation, showed the pictures,and asked the subject to point to the appropriatepicture. The trainer also provided feedback regard-ing the picture selection. During the first sessionfor each training set, 12 trials were presented ran-domly. All remaining training sessions on that setinduded eight randomly selected trials.

In subsequent training sessions on Step 1, thetrainer began each session with the example, fol-lowed by eight training trials using the idioms with-in idiomatic contexts. No additional instructionregarding the meaning of the idioms was provided.Criteria for progressing to training Step 2 indudeda minimum of 88% accuracy for the verbal expla-nation of the idiom and 100% accuracy in pictureselection for 2 consecutive days.

Once the children achieved criteria on Step 1(usually in 2 days), Step 2 of training indudedpresenting the idioms in both a literal context andan idiomatic context. The purpose of this step wasto teach discrimination of idiomatic meaning basedon context. This step was introduced by the trainerthrough an example. The trainer then presentedthe idioms within both a literal and an idiomaticcontext for two trials, each in random order, usingthe procedures described in the third componentof Step 1. The criteria for progressing to the nexttraining set of idioms for this Step 2 were identicalto those of Step 1.

Maintenance testing continued for the previouslylearned training sets. This phase was identical tothe baseline phase; however, withJames, a sequenceof review steps was introduced, because he failedto maintain his newly learned skills. The reviewsteps reintroduced two training procedures: a slightdelay after the trainer's presentation of the narrativebefore James selected a picture and feedback re-garding the accuracy of his response.

At the completion of all sessions, the subjectswere praised for working hard and were providedwith a tangible trinket (e.g., sticker, gum, or bal-loon) to reward on-task behavior.

Generalization testing was conducted in a seriesof follow-up sessions. In the first session, whichmeasured expressive generalization, the subject re-

called an idiom upon hearing its explanation readby the trainer. In the second and third generalizationsessions, 12 new narratives containing the learnedidioms were presented. Only idiomatic contexts werepresented. The dassroom teacher presented the newcontexts in the second session, and the trainer pre-sented them in the third.

ReliabilityAn independent observer attended 57% of all

baseline, treatment, and maintenance sessions todetermine the reliability of the trainer in imple-menting the specified training procedures and inrecording the subjects' responses.

Procedural reliability. Reliability measures weretaken for 26% of the sessions to ensure that thetrainer followed the prescribed procedures. The ob-server scored three procedures for baseline andmaintenance sessions and six procedures for thetraining sessions. Procedural reliability was calcu-lated by dividing the number of correct uses ofprocedures by the total number of correct and in-correct uses and multiplying this value by 100. Themean procedural reliability score for all sessionsobserved was 99%.

Treatment reliability. The observer indepen-dently scored each of the subjects' verbal and/orpointing responses for 31% of all sessions. Thesescores were compared with the trainer's recordingson a trial-by-trial basis; the number of agreementswere divided by the total number of agreementsplus disagreements and multiplied by 100. Themean treatment reliability score for all sessions ob-served was 99%.

Generalization reliability. Interobserver reli-ability was conducted for 50% of the generalizationsessions involving the teachers. Two observers lis-tened to the tape-recorded sessions independentlyand transcribed the child's verbal responses. Theirrecordings were scored for accuracy on a trial-by-trial basis based on the presence of specific contentwords. Reliability, determined by dividing thenumber of agreements by the total number ofagreements plus disagreements multiplied by 100,was 100%.

HELEN K. EZELL and HOWARD GOLDSTEIN

IDIOMBASELINE TRAINING

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Figure 1. Andrew's accurate comprehension of idiomatic and literal interpretations of idiomatic phrases and accurate

verbal explanations of idioms (shaded bars).

RESULTS

The results of idiom training are depicted inFigures 1 through 4. Baseline performance for id-ioms remained low (typically 0%). Once trainingbegan, the children's picture selection accuracy rose

immediately to 100% in almost all cases. Children'sverbal explanations (as seen in the bar portion ofeach graph) sometimes were more variable andrequired more sessions to reach criterion.

Maintenance performance for Andrew and Coreyremained high. Kelsey demonstrated inconsistentresponding during maintenance; however, her per-

formance remained well above her baseline levels.James demonstrated virtually no maintenance ofany of the idioms learned. James seemed to resume

his baseline response pattern of selecting the literalpicture regardless of the context provided. As notedin the method section, review steps were imple-mented to facilitate James' maintenance; these con-

sisted of a delay plus feedback, feedback alone, anddelay alone. The delay-plus-feedback procedure(Sessions 28 through 30) improved his performancebut did not result in maintenance. One session offeedback alone (Session 32) was ineffective withboth Sets 2 and 3. The delay-alone procedure con-

MAINTENANCE

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verbal explanations of idioms (shaded bars).

ducted in Sessions 33 and 34 and again in Sessions36 and 37 was successful and seemed to facilitatesubsequent carryover when the regular maintenancesessions followed. The only exception to this was

for the idiom "kill two birds with one stone" inSet 2.

Expressive and receptive tests of generalizationwere presented after training was completed. Sub-jects' performance on the expressive generalizationtask and the generalization to new contexts is shownin Table 3. Accuracy rates on the expressive taskvaried from 58% to 92%. When idioms were pre-

sented in new contexts by the classroom teacher,subjects demonstrated extreme differences (8% to

92%). Performance was enhanced when the trainerrather than the teacher presented the same new

contexts to the subjects; accuracy rates rose to 100%for 3 subjects and 82% for James.

DISCUSSION

Results indicate that children exhibiting mildmental retardation are able to comprehend idiomsthrough direct training. These children learned to

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Figure 3. James' accurate comprehension of idiomatic and literal interpretations of idiomatic phrases and accurate verbalexplanations of idioms (shaded bars). Maintenance review sessions D and F refer to the use of an enforced delay betweenthe narrative and the child's picture selection plus feedback regarding response accuracy. Feedback alone (F) and delay alone(D) also were used.

discriminate between literal and idiomatic contexts,which appears to be a critical element in under-standing figurative language. All of the children inthis study learned to comprehend 12 idioms in anaverage of 20 sessions (range, 13 to 28, SD =6.48). They exhibited an ability to recall the idiomsin an expressive generalization task with 58% to92% accuracy. Further support of their learningwas demonstrated when all children were able togeneralize, to some extent, their comprehensionwhen idioms were put into novel contexts.

James' failure to maintain his skills followingtraining was somewhat puzzling. Once his main-tenance sessions began, he resumed his pretrainingresponse pattern of selecting the literal represen-tation for each context. The maintenance sessionsdiffered from the training sessions in three ways:

(a) No verbal explanations were required in main-tenance, (b) the pictures were placed in fill viewat all times, and (c) no feedback was providedregarding the accuracy of his response. James' per-formance improved again only when presentationof the pictures was delayed during the maintenancecondition. Thus, it seems that by delaying the avail-

Table 3Generalization Performance

Expressive New contextsgeneraliza-Subject tion Teacher Trainer

Andrew 58% 8% 100%Corey 92% 92% 100%James 67% 42% 82%Kelsey 83% 75% 100%

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ability of the pictures, James learned to respond to

the full narrative rather than to the final few words.In regard to the children's generalization of the

idioms to unfamiliar contexts, all children per-

formed less well with the teachers than with thetrainer. We do not know whether the trainer servedas a discriminative stimulus in the second sessionor whether the children benefited from hearing thecontexts a second time. Future training programs

would be strengthened by induding a variety oftrainers and contexts to enhance generalization.

The children displayed a surprising amount ofexpressive generalization, also known as crossmodal

generalization, by producing the idiomatic phrasewhen the definition was read without the benefitof a context. Although the children were not dis-couraged from verbalizing the idiomatic phraseswhen providing their verbal explanations duringcomprehension training, they rarely did so. How-ever, we do not know to what extent they may

have been rehearsing these idioms covertly through-out training (cf. Ezell & Goldstein, 1989). All ofthe idiomatic phrases consisted of words known bythese children, so that verbal expression requiredonly mastery of the correct word order. Perhapsthis represents an easier task than learning phrases

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HELEN K. EZELL and HOWARD GOLDSTEIN

that include unfamiliar words (cf. Lee, 1981). Thepositive findings regarding crossmodal generaliza-tion suggest that only minimal training in children'sexpression of idioms may be required for general-ization to occur. Although crossmodal generaliza-tion suggests that children understand the meaningof the idioms, it does not suggest or predict futureuse of these idioms. Future research that providesopportunities to observe children's spontaneous useof idioms in conversational speech would providemore information in this regard.One interesting finding of this study concerns

the changes in the children's baseline performance.Two of the children, Andrew and Kelsey, dem-onstrated changes in their response patterns duringbaseline sessions, especially in Set 3. We speculatethat these children became aware that the phrasesused in the two contexts had different meanings.Consequently, they began to vary their responseson both the literal and idiomatic items, guessingrather than always picking the literal representation.Correct responses seemed to reflect guesses, becauseAndrew and Kelsey never got the same idiom cor-rect more than once in Set 3. Perhaps this suggestionof heightened awareness of contextual cues or thatthe phrase may have dual interpretations reflects alearning strategy of these children. Further inves-tigation in this area may uncover conditions orcircumstances that may prepare children with men-tal retardation for future learning.

The findings of this study extend the literatureby showing that children with mild mental retar-dation are capable of comprehending idioms whenappropriate training is provided. Ezell and Gold-stein (199 lb) demonstrated that children taught tomonitor comprehension of ambiguous messagesfailed to generalize this skill to the detection ofidioms. It is likely that a comprehension monitoringapproach failed because children were not attentiveto the appropriate contextual cues. The presentstudy suggests that children can learn to attend tocontextual cues to determine idiomatic meaningwhen idioms are taught individually.When considering that previous research has

found that typical 9-year-olds comprehend idioms

with 20%, 50%, and 67% accuracy as measuredby Lodge and Leach (1975), Prinz (1983), andEzell and Goldstein (199 la), respectively, one mightquestion whether targeting idiom comprehensiontraining for 9-year-old children with mild mentalretardation is developmentally appropriate. Hadthe children exhibited considerable difficulty inlearning to comprehend the idioms or been unableto generalize, we would be inclined to agree. How-ever, these children learned the idioms with relativeease and demonstrated generalization.

Several limitations of this study warrant furthercomment. First, the results may be somewhat lim-iting based on the idioms selected for training. Theselection of idioms was limited to those that couldbe easily (and realistically) depicted, both literallyand figuratively. Also, they were not selected basedon level of difficulty. If the pictures were eliminatedduring training, the choice of idioms could bebroadened considerably. This would permit the useof multiple contexts during training and may en-hance children's generalization.A second limitation may be a failure to conduct

training in a naturalistic setting. Unfortunately, weknow of no method for assessing idiom compre-hension in normal conversation during daily activ-ities.A third limitation may be the use of multiple

training steps or components without conductingan analysis to determine those that were critical forchildren's learning and those that were unnecessary.This may be accomplished in future studies.One final limitation is this study's failure to

measure the functional use of idiom comprehen-sion. If generalization to spontaneous verbal ex-pression could be taught through future research,functional use of this skill could be measured morereadily. However, until this can be measured, wecan only speculate about its impact on learning andsocial development.

In condusion, this study has demonstrated thatchildren with mental retardation are able to learnidioms and generalize their understanding to newcontexts. Teachers and speech-language patholo-gists are encouraged to teach idioms to mentally

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retarded children so that they may have an addi-tional skill to assist them in interacting with normalchildren and in being accepted in regular settings.

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Received October 30, 1989Initial editorial decision April 11, 1990Revisions received July 17, 1990; November 21, 1990;January 14, 1991; May 17, 1991

Final acceptance July 31, 1991Action Editor, Susan A. Fowler