This study aimed to compare idiom comprehension abilities and error types between school-aged children with typical development (TD) and those with vocabulary delay (VD). We also explored how and what kinds of relations lie among idiom comprehension skills and three executive function (EF) components (working memory, inhibition, shifting), in two groups.
Eighteen children with TD and nineteen children with VD participated in this study. The children’s performance was assessed via idiom comprehension task and EF tasks of working memory, inhibition, and shifting (NWR, SST, DCCS). As a result, VD group performed significantly lower in general on idiom comprehension task than TD, and both performed better on the contextually cued condition. The results highlight that children with VD require conscious effort to activate inhibitory control of irrelevant information to fully make use of contextual cues.