Children's Use of Semantic and Syntactic Information for Word Recognition and Determination of Sentence Meaningfulness

Abstract

Third-, sixth-, and college-grade students were presented with entire sentences for silent reading and were asked to monitor these sentences either for the presence of nonwords or for meaningfulness. The sentence forms were of three types: semantically coherent, syntactically intact (but nonmeaningful), and incoherent (nonmeaningful, nongrammatical). Three developmental differences were obtained in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness. First, facilitation produced by the addition of semantic information (semantically coherent sentence condition) to syntactic information (syntactically intact condition) during word level analysis was greater for children as compared to adults. Second, the addition of syntactic information to nongrammatical incoherent strings of words again facilitated word level analysis for the children. Third, the difference in decision speed between monitoring sentences for words versus meaningfulness was negligible for adults, but was very robust for children. These results are consistent with the notion that sentential (syntactic as well as semantic) information is relied upon to a relatively greater extent by children, as compared to adults, for word level analyses. Adult readers, on the other hand, appear to utilize syntactic and semantic information as much at the level of sentential analysis as at the level of word recognition.