Children's Use of Context in Word Recognition: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game

Abstract

SCHWANTES, FREDERICK M.; BOESL, SHARON L.; and RITZ, ELSBETH G. Children's Use of Context in Word Recognition: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 730-736. 2 experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of varying the amount of preceding-sentence context upon the lexical decision speed of thirdand sixth-grade and college-level students. For each age group, the mean differences in decision time between congruous and incongruous context became greater as length of preceding context increased. Relative to a no-context condition, increasing amounts of congruous context facilitated wordrecognition rates for younger but not for adult readers, and similarly, increasing amounts of incongruous context interfered with word-recognition rates for younger but not for adult readers. The results are interpreted in terms of increased degrees of automatic word processing abilities and decreased reliance upon contextual information to aid word recognition with increased reading experience and reading ability. In experiment 2, it was found that generating correct versus incorrect predictions of the target item had a much greater effect on the lexical decision speed of third graders relative to adults. These results are discussed within the context of developmental differences in the demands for shifting attention between visual and contextual processing levels.