The Effect of Sentence Context on Word Recognition in Second- and Sixth-Grade Children

Abstract

SECONDAND SIXTH-GRADE children named words preceded by either congruous, neutral, or incongruous contexts that were either one or three sentences long, and were drawn from second-grade reading materials. Both groups displayed significant contextual facilitation and contextual inhibition effects on naming time. The effects did not depend upon the length of the prior context, indicating that within the limits of the manipulation employed in this experiment, the contextual effects on word recognition arose primarily from within the sentence containing the target word. The second-grade subjects displayed larger context effects than the sixth-grade subjects. The implications of these findings for current model of context effects on word recognition are discussed.