To break the\ue2\u20ac\ua6.embarrassment: Text Comprehension Skills and Figurative Competence in skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders

The aim of the present study was to investigate children\u2019s ability to complete idiom fragments embedded in stories. Previous studies found that children\u2019s and preadolescents\u2019 ability to comprehend a text was related to their ability to understand an idiomatic expression (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2005; Levorato, Nesi, & Cacciari, 2004; Nippold, Moran, & Schwarz, 2001). Comprehension and production processes share a vast amount of conceptual and lexical knowledge. Hence, we hypothesized that children\u2019s text reading comprehension skills also might be related to their ability to produce nonliteral completions. Skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders (age range from 7.4 to 10.3) were presented with short stories that ended with an idiomatic fragment (e.g., \u201cPaul broke the . . .\u201d for the idiom \u201cbreak the ice\u201d) and were asked to complete the story. The children\u2019s completions were coded as Literal, Idiomatic, or Figurative, as in previous studies (Levorato & Cacciari, 1992, 1995). The results showed that children\u2019s ability to understand a text was related to their ability to complete idiomatic fragments figuratively. Less-skilled comprehenders provided more literal completions than skilled comprehenders who, in turn, provided more idiomatic completions