Speakers in a particular language community differ in their linguistic expression, whether when it comes to pronunciation, sentence construction, vocabulary and style, or interpretation of the words. This is especially evident in language development during the period of elementary education, which is distinguished by significant lexical progress. A special question that arises is that about comprehension of the connotative meaning in terms of phraseological units, that are very common in written sources for language teaching, which is problematic due to the cognitive level of the pupils in elementary school, as well as the lack of systematic approach to such content in curricula for classroom teaching. The aim of this paper is to determine the comprehension possibilities concerning the denotative and connotative meaning of words, among fourth graders in elementary school, and, given the fact that connotative meaning in literary and artistic texts often occurs in the form of phraseological units, the research results indicate the impact that (mis)understanding of those units has on the process of reading for understanding. The theoretical part of the paper starts with basic knowledge about the word meaning, language development of the child with special emphasis on lexical development at school age and ends with the basics of phraseology and current knowledge about comprehension of idioms regarding elementary school children. In the practical part, there are results of research on the understanding of denotative and connotative meaning of words among fourth grade students, obtained on the basis of a pre-constructed questionnaire, that present the difficulties in interpretation of connotative meaning at this age.