Comprehension and Inference: Relationships Between Oral and Written Modalities in Good and Poor Comprehenders During Adolescence.

Purpose We investigated the relationships between text reading comprehension and oral idiom comprehension in adolescents. We also examined the more specific relationships between inference in text comprehension and inference in idiom comprehension. Method We selected participants from an initial sample of 140 students aged 13-15 years to form 2 groups, according to their decoding and reading comprehension abilities: 1 group of good comprehenders/good decoders (n = 49) and 1 group of less skilled comprehenders but with adequate decoding skills (n = 20). The reading comprehension task comprised both literal and inferential (text-based and knowledge-based) questions. These 2 groups were then compared on an idiom comprehension task. In this task, idioms were presented orally, and students were placed in a situation that simulated a real-life oral interaction. The idioms were novel for the students (translated from a foreign language), either transparent or opaque, and presented either with a supportive context or without any context. Results Good reading comprehenders outperformed less skilled ones on the idiom task. Both groups benefited from the supportive context, especially the good comprehenders. Knowledge-based inferences in written text comprehension were related to contextual inferences for opaque idioms, while semantic inferences for transparent idioms were related to literal text comprehension, but not to text-connecting inferences. Conclusion These results are discussed both theoretically, in terms of cross-modal comprehension processes, and practically, in terms of implications for remediation.

Inferential language processes across adolescence: A test with novel idioms.

Idiom comprehension relies on the ability to draw inferences from different cues in a communication situation. Adopting a developmental perspective, we investigated how this ability changes across adolescence. To this end, we designed a computerized system that allowed us to simulate a communication situation through short videos placing participants at the center of the interaction. Four groups of participants (11, 13, 15, and adult students) performed an idiomatic expression comprehension task, in which idiom familiarity was controlled. We manipulated the idioms' transparency (vs. opacity) and presentation (supportive narrative context inducing an idiomatic interpretation of the expression vs. nonsupportive narrative context). Analyses revealed an improvement in idiom comprehension in terms of contextual inferences but they failed to reveal any significant difference in terms of semantic inferences. This study yields fresh arguments in support of the notion that inferential ability based on context continues to develop beyond childhood.

"That's really clever!" Ironic hyperbole understanding in children.

Hyperbole supports irony comprehension in adults by heightening the contrast between what is said and the actual situation. Because young children do not perceive the communication situation as a whole, but rather give precedence to either the utterance or the context, we predicted that hyperbole would reduce irony comprehension in six-year-olds (n = 40) by overemphasizing what was said. By contrast, ten-year-olds (n = 40) would benefit from hyperbole in the way that adults do, as they would perceive the utterance and context as a whole, highlighted by the speaker's ironic intent. Short animated cartoons featuring ironic criticisms were shown to participants. We assessed comprehension of the speaker's belief and speaker's intent. Results supported our predictions. The development of mentalization during school years and its impact on the development of irony comprehension is discussed.

How children use emotional prosody: Crossmodal emotional integration?

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from happiness to sadness: 90% happy, 60% happy, 30% happy, neutral, 30% sad, 60% sad, 90% sad) and emotional prosody (i.e., sad vs. happy). Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and a control group of adult students. The children had a different pattern of results from the adults, with only the 9-year-olds exhibiting the crossmodal effect whatever the emotional condition. These results advance our understanding of emotional prosody processing and the efficiency of crossmodal integration in children and are discussed in terms of a developmental trajectory and factors that may modulate the efficiency of this effect in children. (PsycINFO Database Record

Are idiom comprehension difficulties in patients with schizophrenia due to working memory and executive deficits?

Background and Objectives: We investigated idiom comprehension in patients with schizophrenia, and the involvement of working memory and executive functions in this comprehension. Methods: Nineteen patients with schizophrenia aged 22-46 years (mean = 34.73 years) took part in this study, and were matched for age and education level with a control group. Our assessment consisted of (1) an experimental task assessing idiom comprehension through short stories, (2) three tasks assessing verbal, visuospatial and multimodal spans, and (3) four tasks assessing executive functions (Hayling test, Stroop test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Trail Making Test). Results and Conclusion: Results highlighted several deficits in the comprehension of idioms in patients with schizophrenia. An executive deficit is not sufficient to explain these difficulties. Nevertheless, the conceptual disorganization observed in the patients conduce them to not focus their attention on the relevant elements avoiding the comprehension of idioms (AU)

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Inferring emotions from speech prosody: not so easy at age five.

Previous research has suggested that children do not rely on prosody to infer a speaker's emotional state because of biases toward lexical content or situational context. We hypothesized that there are actually no such biases and that young children simply have trouble in using emotional prosody. Sixty children from 5 to 13 years of age had to judge the emotional state of a happy or sad speaker and then to verbally explain their judgment. Lexical content and situational context were devoid of emotional valence. Results showed that prosody alone did not enable the children to infer emotions at age 5, and was still not fully mastered at age 13. Instead, they relied on contextual information despite the fact that this cue had no emotional valence. These results support the hypothesis that prosody is difficult to interpret for young children and that this cue plays only a subordinate role up until adolescence to infer others' emotions.

Emotional speech comprehension in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

UNLABELLED: We examined the understanding of emotional speech by children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We predicted that they would have difficulty understanding emotional speech, not because of an emotional prosody processing impairment but because of problems drawing appropriate inferences, especially in multiple-cue environments. Twenty-six children and adolescents with ASD and 26 typically developing controls performed a computerized task featuring emotional prosody, either embedded in a discrepant context or without any context at all. They must identify the speaker's feeling. When the prosody was the sole cue, participants with ASD performed just as well as controls, relying on this cue to infer the speaker's intention. When the prosody was embedded in a discrepant context, both ASD and TD participants exhibited a contextual bias and a negativity bias. However ASD participants relied less on the emotional prosody than the controls when it was positive. We discuss these findings with respect to executive function and intermodal processing. LEARNING OUTCOMES: After reading this article, the reader should be able to (1) describe the ASD participants pragmatic impairments, (2) explain why ASD participants did not have an emotional prosody processing impairment, and (3) explain why ASD participants had difficulty inferring the speaker's intention from emotional prosody in a discrepant situation.

Understanding expressive speech acts: the role of prosody and situational context in French-speaking 5- to 9-year-olds.

PURPOSE: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend & J. Bryant, 2000)? METHOD: In the first experiment, a group of 5- to 9-year-old children and a group of adults performed a computerized judgment task. They had to determine the speaker's intention on the basis of an utterance produced with a particular prosody (positive or negative) in a particular situational context (positive or negative). In the second experiment, the same prosodic utterances were presented to 5- to 9-year-old children without a situational context. RESULTS: The 5- and 7-year-old children relied primarily on situational context, in contrast to adults, who relied on prosody. The 9-year-olds relied on both cues (Experiment 1). When prosody was the sole cue (Experiment 2), all children relied on this cue to infer the speaker's intention. CONCLUSIONS: The results are discussed and integrated into a larger conceptual framework that includes research on lexical bias and sarcasm.

Idiom comprehension in French-speaking children and adolescents with Williams' syndrome.

This study looks at idiom comprehension by French-speaking people with Williams' syndrome (WS) and metapragmatic knowledge is examined. Idiomatic expressions are a nonliteral form of language where there is a considerable difference between what is said (literal interpretation) and what is meant (idiomatic interpretation). WS is characterized by a relatively preserved formal language, social interest and poor conversational skills. Using this framework, the present study aims to explore the comprehension of idiomatic expressions by 20 participants with WS. Participants performed a story completion task (comprehension task), and a task of metapragmatic knowledge to justify their chosen answers. WS performances were compared to typically developing children with the same verbal mental age. The main results can be summarized as follows: (1) people with WS have difficulties to understand idioms; (2) WS group seems to perform partly as typically developing children for the acquisition of metapragmatic knowledge of linguistic convention: there is a progressive increase in metapragmatic knowledge of linguistic convention as age increased. Our results indicate a delay of acquisition in idiom comprehension in Williams' syndrome.

French-speaking children's understanding of sarcasm: the role of intonation and context.

The aim of this study was to examine a form of sarcasm that has hardly been considered to date, sarcastic requests, at an earlier period of development than addressed in past developmental research. This article looked specifically at the role of intonation and context in sarcastic-request understanding by native French-speaking children ages 3 to 7 years. Forty-eight children (16 per group) had to complete stories that varied on 2 factors: intonation (sarcastic and neutral) and context (sarcastic and neutral). To maximize the contrast between the 2 types of intonation, the same phrase expressing sarcasm was added at the end of each test utterance. As a methodological control, the intonation of this phrase was evaluated both acoustically (by a computerized signal editor) and perceptually (by a group of adult participants). It turned out that the experimental task was too difficult for the 3-year-olds. However, this study offers some highly interesting information about sarcastic-request understanding by 5- and 7-year-olds. The ability to take into account cues that help children understand sarcastic requests evolves considerably between the ages of 5 and 7: 5-year-olds appear to primarily base their interpretation on intonation; it is not until they are 7 that children are also able to take context into account. Thus, intonation seems to be an earlier cue than context in sarcastic-request understanding.