Comparing Perception of Antonymy Between Persian-Speaking Educable Children With Intellectual Disabilities and Typically Developing Children

Antonymy is a key feature of everyday conversation, mental organization of words and discourse. It is also known that the most important characteristic of children with intellectual disabilities is language delay. Therefore, such children may have difficulties in the perception of antonymy. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative study of the perception of various types of antonymy between Typically Developing (TD) and educable Persian-speaking children with intellectual disabilities. Specifically, whether the perception of various types of antonymy is similar in these two groups of children. This research may offer clues for the necessity of the investigation of antonymy to help perceive the semantic knowledge by children with intellectual disabilities because the semantic knowledge is in turn vital for language comprehension.
The study subjects included 15 TD children between 6 to 8 years of age and 15 educable children with intellectual disabilities with mental age of 6 to 8 years. Data were collected via a researcher-made test of perception of antonymy. A total of 30 questions were used to compare the perception of antonymy in terms of simple, gradable, reverse, converse, open and close taxonomy antonyms. Each question included three words.
Except for the gradable antonymy subcategory, the perception of various types of antonymy between two groups of children showed a significant difference (P The research findings indicated that children with intellectual disabilities had difficulties with antonymy perception.