Children's Word Recognition in Context: Spreading Activation, Expectancy, and Modularity

Abstract

STANOVICH, KEITH E.; NATHAN, RUTH G.; WEST, RICHARD F.; and VALA-RossI, MARILYN. Children's Word Recognition in Context: Spreading Activation, Expectancy, and Modularity. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1418-1428. Both third-grade children (mean age 9-6) and fifth-grade children (mean age 11-6) performed like adults in that named a word (e.g., tractor) just as fast when it was preceded by a related but incongruous incomplete sentence context (e.g., farmer planted the) as when it was preceded by a neutral context (e.g., they said it was the). The results support the assumption of the 2-process interactive-compensatory model that context effects on children's word recognition are caused by a spreading-activation process and an expectancy-based attentional process that operate simultaneously. The findings indicate that the word recognition input system of children as young as third graders displays some modular properties. The conclusion that word recognition is modular for adults and that it displays considerable modularity even in children as young as third graders has implications for global theories of the reading process because other recent developmental/individual difference findings are more easily accommodated by modular models of reading than by hypothesis-testing models that do not as clearly demarcate the word level of processing.