The Effects of Sentence Context in Good and Poor Readers: A Test of Stanovich's Interactive-Compensatory Model

Abstract

NINEAND TEN-YEAR OLD good and poor readers read a target stimulus, either a word or a pseudohomophone, preceded by incongruous, congruous, or no-sentence context in the case of words, and by congruous or no-sentence context for the pseudohomophones. Both good and poor readers showed contextual inhibition with incongruous context, but only poor readers showed facilitation with congruous context. With the nonword targets this facilitation was particularly effective, such that poor readers' performance matched that of the good readers. The results provided no evidence of automatic facilitation, and as such were inconsistent with West and Stanovich's (1978) adaptation of Posner and Snyder's (1975) two process theory of expectancy. Results were, however, fully consistent with an interactive-compensatory model of reading (Stanovich, 1980).