How Children Get Meaning from Printed Words.

BARRON, RODERICK W., and BARON, JONATHAN. How Children Get Meaning from Printed Words. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 587-594. Children from the first to the eighth grades were given picture-word pairs and asked to say whether the items rhymed, in a sound task, or "went together," in a meaning task. The sound task to meaning task ratio for times was constant across all grades. The sound task was affected by concurrent vocal interference (repeating the word "double" while doing the task) at all grades, but the meaning task was not, even in the first grade. When the distractor items were semantically related (for the sound task) or rhymed (for the meaning task), more errors were made in both tasks at all grade levels. It was concluded that children can get meaning from printed words in the same way that adults can, that is, in large part directly from print without the use of an intermediate phonemic code.