Individual differences in reading comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children: The influence of semantic priming during sentence reading

Abstract

Group differences in semantic priming between young readers with different comprehension levels have been reported, with poor readers showing reduced or no context-independent semantic priming compared to normal readers. However, other studies have not been able to replicate these effects on an individual differences level, even though the spreading of semantic activation is hypothesized to play a role in the reading comprehension process. In the present study, we investigated whether priming during sentence reading, rather than single word priming, could be related to children's reading comprehension scores. A self-paced reading experiment involving both associated and non-associated, context-dependent (functional) and context-independent (categorical) semantic relations was administered to 137 Dutch monolingual and bilingual children. Delayed facilitative priming effects were observed for non-associated context-dependently and context-independently related word pairs, but these were not linked to individual differences in reading comprehension. Monolinguals and bilinguals showed similar performance on almost all language measures, including semantic priming and reading comprehension.