A Study of the Characteristics for Simile Comprehension of Children with Mental Retardation

정신지체 아동의 직유 이해에 관한 연구

The aim of the present study was to investigate a simile comprehension of children with and without mental retardation. Thirteen children with mental retardation and ten normal children with matched receptive vocabulary ability participated in the study. They were between five and eight years old in the age of receptive vocabulary. Fourteen picture plates were used and each plate consisted of three pictures. The findings were as fellows. First, children with mental retardation made significantly more errors than normal children in the comprehension of simile. Second, mental retarded children and normal children did not have a significant correlation between receptive vocabulary development and comprehension of simile. Finally, on simile interpretation type, children with mental retardation were likely to think a tenor into a vehicle because they failed to recognize the syntactic structure of simile, 'A is like B'. Thus, It is important to teach mental retarded children the syntactic structures of simile and to provide them with a variety of experience as well as to let them know an exact meaning of words.