Abstract
Presents results from a study designed to determine whether idioms cause difficulty for children in the reading and understanding of prose. Two hundred and fifty-six grade eight children were randomly chosen from two high schools and each child was tested with one of four tests which contained increasing amounts of idiomatic expressions. The treatment effect was highly significant, the means increased steadily, with the highest scores associated with the test containing no idioms and the lowest scores associated with the test containing idioms in all items. There was no significant difference between the performance of boys and girls in the tests. An analysis of the four treatment groups showed that there were significant differences between the means of all groups except the two groups containing the greatest number of idioms in the test items.