The Effect of Semantic Context on Children's Word Recognition

Abstract

SCHVANEVELDT, ROGER; ACKERMAN, BRIAN P.; and SEMLEAR, TEDDY. The Effect of Semantic Context on Children's Word Recognition. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 612-616. This study employs a lexical-decision task to investigate children's use of semantic context in word recognition. Previous studies have shown that young children do not use contextual factors in word recognition as much as older children do. However, these studies do not distinguish between knowledge of contextual structure (syntactic and semantic) and the use of contextual information. In this study, secondand fourth-grade children made decisions about words in semantically related or unrelated contexts. By presenting common words and their associates, childrens' knowledge of the contextual information was assured, and a more accurate assessment of their use of context could be made. Younger and poorer readers benefit at least as much from semantic context in word recognition as do older and better readers.