Comparison Metaphor and Reasoning Comprehension Between Children with Borderline Intelligence and Typical Developing School-Aged children

Abstract

Purpose: Metalinguistic skills play a critical role in school-aged children’s language development and academic achievement. This study investigates whether metaphorical reasoning in children with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) (or slow learners) differs from that of typically developing children.Methods: A total of 52 children (29 boys and 23 girls), who voluntarily agreed to participate in the study, were included. Children were categorized into three groups (15 slow learner group, 18 chronological age-matched group, and 19 language age-matched group) based on their K-WISC and receptive vocabulary scores in the Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test (REVT). All children completed the Metaphorical and Reasoning Comprehension test (MARC) to estimate their metaphor and reasoning comprehension ability.Results: As a result of a one-way analysis of variance, there was a significant difference among the groups, and a significant difference was found between the slow learners and the chronological age-matched group (<i>p</i>=0.000), but no significant difference was presented between the slow learner group and the language age-matched group. Similarly, regarding the expressive vocabulary score, a one-way ANOVA revealed a significant difference only between the slow learner and the chronological age-matched group (<i>p</i>=0.000). When comparing the scores for metaphorical reasoning comprehension among the three groups, the metaphorical reasoning comprehension scores were significantly different among the groups, with the slow learners having the lowest scores: the slow learner group was substantially different from the language age-matched group (<i>p</i>=0.025), while there was also a significant difference between the slow learner group and the chronological age-matched group (<i>p</i>=0.000).Conclusions: This study suggests that the semantic component of language is not affected in BIF children, but rather, the meaning of words is affected by tasks that require higher-order metalinguistic skills, such as understanding metaphorical inferences embedded in the context of a sentence. Accordingly, the ability to understand metaphorical reasoning can identify slow learners.