Locus of the Context Effect in Children's Word Recognition.

SCHWANTES, FREDERICK M. Locus of the Context Effect in Children's Word Recognition. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 895-903. 2 experiments were conducted to examine those differences in word-recognition processes between third-grade and college students which are specifically related to the children's relatively greater use of context in facilitating word-recognition speed. In experiment 1, a lexical decision task was presented under 2 conditions of target word visual clarity. It was found that developmental differences in magnitude of the context effect were greater under the clear as compared to the degraded target word condition. These results were interpreted in terms of an interactive compensatory model of reading and indicated that children's greater reliance on context is directly related to their slower visual encoding processes. In experiment 2, performance was compared in a lexical versus a rhyming decision task. Task differences in decision speed in the no-context condition were smaller for children than for adults. These results suggested that children make more predominant use of phonological recoding to obtain lexical access than do adults. However, there was no evidence that developmental differences in context use were related to this differential use of the indirect pathway.