Comprehension of idioms in children with mild intellectual disability
Előadó: Éva Höffler-Pénzes, Endre Horváth, Beáta Szenczi, Klára Marton
Szerző bemutatkozása:
The members of our team are educators and special educators who have experience in higher education and educational practice as well. We are interested in the learning processes of children with mild intellectual disability. Now we are focusing on figurative language comprehension in mild intellectual disability.
Előadás absztrakt:
The aim of our study is (1) to investigate the reliability and validity of our Idiom Questionnaire; (2) to examine the idiom comprehension of children with mild intellectual disability; (3) to find occurring differences between the performance of the integrated students (IS) and the children who are learning in special schools (SS). The Idiom Questionnaire contains ten multiple choice tasks, ten visual idiom comprehension tasks and ten idioms in story condition. Altogether 243 students with mild intellectual disability (104 IS and 139 SS children) participated in the study. In our sample we have 6th, 8th and 10th graded students from both types of schools.
We have verified the validity of the Idiom Questionnaire with factor analysis (KMO=0.83). The factor analysis has shown five different factors in the full questionnaire. The reliability of the questionnaire for the whole sample is quite well (Cronbach-αfull=0,87), and the reliability of the two subgroups is acceptable as well (Cronbach-α IS=0,74; Cronbach-α SS=0,7). Our results show that the performance of the 8th graded students is significally better in the multiple choice task subtest than the performance of the 6th graded students (without reference of the school type). We can also state that there is not any significant difference between the performance of the investigated IS and SS students in our questionnaire.
We conclude that the Idiom Questionnaire is appropriate for testing the idiom comprehension ability of children with mild intellectual disability. Our results are pointing on the difficulties of the examined population in idiom comprehension; hereby it can help the developmental process.
