The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of children with borderline intellectual functioning to retrieve and infer the meaning of words by measuring scores based on two tasks that involved defining homonyms.
The study participants were 36 students living in Chungcheong area, including a total of 12 children with borderline intellectual functioning in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades; 12 children with matched language age; and 12 children with matched chronological age. The criterion for borderline intellectual functioning children was assessed to be an IQ score between 70 and 85. To determine the abilities of each group to retrieve words and infer meaning from homonyms, this study conducted two tasks that involved defining homonyms: one without context sentences and the other with context sentences. The results are as follows.
First, in the task of defining homonyms without context sentences, children with borderline intellectual functioning did not perform differently from children with matched language age but scored significantly lower than children with matched chronological age. Moreover, children with matched language age also scored significantly lower than children with matched chronological age.
Second, in the task of defining homonyms with context sentences, children with borderline intellectual functioning did not differ from children with matched language age; however, they scored significantly lower than children with matched chronological age. Additionally, there was no difference between children with matched language age and children with matched chronological age.
The findings of this study suggest that vocabulary ability, cognitive ability, language development, higher language skills, and higher cognitive ability affect word retrieval and inference of word meaning. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that providing contextual sentences is an important way to improve the ability of children with borderline intellectual functioning to retrieve and infer meaning of words, as they are restricted in expanding their vocabulary through inference.
Using homonym definition tasks, this study examined the characteristics of word retrieval and inference of meaning among children with borderline intellectual functioning. Consequently, it has laid the foundation for developing learning materials for school-age children with borderline intellectual functioning who have difficulty expanding their vocabulary and developing their language skills.