Lexical- and sentence-level processes in comprehension of written sentences

Abstract

Two experiments and three measures of lexical skills (word finding, rapid automatized naming, receptive vocabulary) were administered to 24 third and 24 fifth graders. Each experiment included two between-subject variables (grade and sex) and four within-subject variables (mode of sentence presentation – one word and one-sentence-at-a-time; word type – orthographic, phonological and semantic foils; position of foil in sentence – beginning, middle, and end; and sentence type – meaningful and nonsense). The experiments contrasted on reading comprehension task: receptive sentence acceptability (Experiment 1) or expressive sentence reproduction (Experiment 2). One-word-at-a-time presentation, which highlights the lexical unit, resulted in better accuracy on the expressive task that required verbatim reproduction than on the forced choice receptive task. Word finding and rapid automatized naming that require active production of phonologically-referenced name codes, but not receptive vocabulary, were correlated with measures of word recognition and reading comprehension in the experiments and on the psychometric tests. These results are consistent with Perfetti's contention that a phonologically-based name code is the heart of lexical access.