Children’s Use of Comprehension Strategies in Response to Relational Words

Identifying children with deficits in relational word comprehension (e.g., spatial, temporal, quantitative, and dimensional words) is an important responsibility of clinicians serving a young population. Difficulties arise in obtaining accurate clinical assessments because children’s responses to relational words may be heavily influenced by factors other than semantic understanding, such as comprehension strategies children use before they have full understanding of word meanings. Unless the influence of such strategies is taken into account, we may overestimate or underestimate a child’s level of comprehension. In this paper we focus on the potential effects of children’s comprehension strategies on responses to relational words and discuss methods for taking these strategies into account during assessment.