Journal of Reading Behavior
1991, Volume XXIII, No. 3
CHILDREN'S USE OF SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC
INFORMATION FOR WORD RECOGNITION AND
DETERMINATION OF SENTENCE MEANINGFULNESS
Frederick M. Schwantes
Northern Illinois University
ABSTRACT
Third-, sixth-, and college-grade students were presented with entire sentences for
silent reading and were asked to monitor these sentences either for the presence
of nonwords or for meaningfulness. The sentence forms were of three types:
semantically coherent, syntactically intact (but nonmeaningful), and incoherent
(nonmeaningful, nongrammatical). Three developmental differences were obtained in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus
meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness. First, facilitation produced by the addition
of semantic information (semantically coherent sentence condition) to syntactic
information (syntactically intact condition) during word level analysis was greater
for children as compared to adults. Second, the addition of syntactic information
to nongrammatical incoherent strings of words again facilitated word level analysis
for the children. Third, the difference in decision speed between monitoring
sentences for words versus meaningfulness was negligible for adults, but was very
robust for children. These results are consistent with the notion that sentential
(syntactic as well as semantic) information is relied upon to a relatively greater
extent by children, as compared to adults, for word level analyses. Adult readers,
on the other hand, appear to utilize syntactic and semantic information as much
at the level of sentential analysis as at the level of word recognition.
Investigations of reading skill development have been conducted within a variety of different reading models. The various models share the common notion that
processing written text takes place at many different levels and utilizes a number
of different informational sources. For example, visual information is analyzed,
individual words are recognized, syntactical relationships are evaluated, meanings
of words are combined, and an overall meaning of the text is ascertained. Hypothesized relationships between these levels of text processing have served as the impe335
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Journal of Reading Behavior
tus for a number of different models of reading. Each of these types of models
serves an important heuristic function for organizing different bodies of research
pertinent to the development of reading skill.
One class of reading models assumes that relations between different levels of
processing are autonomous. Often such models describe bottom-up processes which
postulate that a given level operates on the input received from the immediately
preceding level, without being influenced by other levels (e.g., Gough, 1985).
Such models frequently emphasize the automatic nature of lower level processes
(LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). The framework provided by this class of models is
useful as a heuristic for organizing a number of important developmental findings
such as work on the acquisition of automatic and rapid word recognition skills
(Ehri & Wilce, 1983; Stanovich, Cunningham, & West, 1981) and the various
methods of word recognition practice which facilitate this acquisition (Ehri &
Roberts, 1979; Raduege & Schwantes, 1987).
In contrast to bottom-up models, top-down models assume that higher level
expectations direct lower level processes to execute only those analyses which
could confirm a higher level hypothesis (e.g., Smith, 1978). This approach provides
a framework for developmental research on children's ability to generate hypotheses about forthcoming print and on their ability to direct attention to facilitate
processing of the hypothesized print (Pearson & Studt, 1975; Schwantes, 1982).
A third class of reading models, interactive models, assumes that different
processing levels mutually affect one another and that outcomes from both lower
and higher level analyses are combined to determine the best interpretation of the
input (e.g., Morton, 1969; Rumelhart, 1985). In these models, no single source of
information is relied upon by itself to produce an outcome and the final interpretation is that which receives support from the largest number of analyses. The basic
developmental implication growing out of the interactive approach has been the
notion that development of lower level automatic and rapid word recognition skills
affects the degree to which higher level processes have an impact on word recognition. Investigations of this notion have led to the formulation of the interactivecompensatory model of reading (Stanovich, 1980). According to this model, interactive effects occur through the formation of expectancies which are compensatory
in nature, that is, higher level processes affect lower level processes under conditions in which the lower level processes (such as word recognition) are nonautomatic and/or are slowed, for example, due to the degradation of visual features
(Stanovich & West, 1979) or to the lack of fluent reading skill (Schwantes, 1981).
During compensatory processing in young readers, it is assumed that an attentional
expectancy mechanism becomes operable which utilizes prior contextual information to generate specific word expectancies. If the expected word occurs, then
recognition time is significantly facilitated relative to recognizing the word in isolation (with no preceding sentence context). If an unexpected word occurs, however,
then attention must be redirected and recognition time is significantly slowed.
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
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In the present study, the notion of interaction among informational sources
was employed as a postulate from which three hypotheses pertinent to developmental changes in the function of interactive processes were derived and investigated. First, the present study was designed to investigate whether the often replicated findings of developmental differences in use of meaningful context to
facilitate the recognition speed for reading single, sentence-completion words (e.g.,
Schwantes, 1985; Stanovich, Nathan, West, & Vala-Rossi, 1985) could be extended to the recognition of a sequence of words embedded within an entire meaningful sentence. Previous findings which have been obtained in developmental
studies investigating the degree of contextual impact on the recognition of single
words have been interpreted in terms of strong interactive effects in children at the
level of word recognition. These previous studies are open to criticism because of
a potential limitation—the individual target words were typically sentence completion words and were presented in isolation after the subject had completed reading
the entire preceding context. Thus, any possible developmental differences due to
processing words within a sentence in a cascaded manner, that is, use of partially
processed information from one word to facilitate processing of a subsequent word
(McClelland, 1979; McClelland & O'Regan, 1981), or to parafoveal processing of
neighboring words (Rayner, 1986) is untapped. If adults are more sophisticated at
overlapping, cascaded word processing and make greater use of parafoveal information, then the single-word recognition procedure may greatly overestimate the degree of developmental difference in context use.
A second issue involves the degree of specificity of contextually generated
expectancies and the type of information relied upon (semantic and syntactic) to
generate these expectancies. The present study was designed to investigate whether
syntactic information per se can contribute to observed developmental differences
in speed of word recognition. Relatively little emphasis has been given to young
readers' possible use of syntax as a source of information from which to generate
expectancies during reading. This may be because syntax, in and of itself, does
not typically provide sufficient information for the generation of a specific word
and it has been assumed that the range of items activated by attentional expectancies
in children is rather narrow. However, Schwantes (1985) provided data suggesting
that contextual information can have a facilitation effect on young readers' speed
of recognizing words that are relatively less common in a given context, albeit still
semantically acceptable. This finding suggests that the range of words affected by
sentence context in children may be potentially quite large. Thus, recognition of
words that are uncommon in a given semantic context may still be facilitated by
the presence of relevant syntactic information. Recent data reported by Simons and
Leu (1987), based on an analysis of children's oral reading errors, indicated that
middle elementary grade school children are quite sensitive to the syntactic constraints of context. Willows and Ryan (1986) reached a similar conclusion in a
study assessing the relation between grammatical sensitivity and reading level in
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Journal of Reading Behavior
grade school children. Thus, it appears that young grade school children are sensitive to syntactic constraints during reading. The present study is an attempt to
investigate whether this syntactic sensitivity translates into increased word recognition speed during an online reading task.
A third purpose of the present study was to investigate whether children and
adults make relatively different use of context during reading: Children may make
relatively greater use of context to aid word recognition, whereas adults make
relatively greater use of context to aid comprehension. Stanovich in his work (e.g.,
Stanovich & West, 1983) has focused upon the interactive process as it affects
individual word recognition, whereas Goodman (1976, 1981) has emphasized the
interactive process as it affects reading of larger text units and gathering of larger
units of meaning. A basic premise of the present study is that strongest interactive
effects occur at the level of processing toward which attention is allocated. Given
this premise it seems reasonable to hypothesize that during different phases of
development of reading fluency, attention is allocated to different levels of processing. Data consistent with this general idea were obtained by Leu, deGroff, and
Simons (1986) in an analysis of children's oral reading errors. They found that
children's use of context for word recognition during reading of a typical children's
story text was inversely related to measures of reading achievement, including
standardized comprehension scores. These findings suggest that context has greater
effects on the word recognition accuracy of less mature readers and has a decreasing
effect on word recognition accuracy as comprehension level increases. Thus, there
may be developmental differences in the type of the linguistic unit toward which
information is being integrated and about which decisions are being made
(Schwantes, 1985). Strongest interaction effects may occur primarily at the level
of individual word recognition in children, whereas in adults, strongest interaction effects may occur primarily at the level of comprehension and meaning
determination.
In the present study, children and adults were presented with entire sentences
for silent reading and were asked to monitor these sentences either for words/
non words or for meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness. The sentences were of three
types: semantically coherent, syntactically intact (but nonmeaningful), and incoherent (nonmeaningful, nongrammatical). The design of the study and the data analytic
approach are motivated by three specific a priori predictions. The first prediction
is that the addition of semantic information to syntactic information will speed
young readers' word recognition to a greater extent than it will that of adults.
Specifically, it is predicted that the difference in word recognition speed when
evaluating semantically coherent versus syntactically intact sentences will be
greater in children than in adults. This finding would extend previous findings of
developmental differences in use of semantic context to facilitate recognition speed
of isolated words to the recognition of a sequence of words embedded within an
entire meaningful sentence.
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
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The second prediction is that the young readers' speed of recognizing words
will vary as a function of the presence versus absence of syntactic information
more so than will that of adults. Specifically, it is predicted that differences in
word recognition speed when evaluating syntactically intact versus incoherent sentences will be greater in children than in adults.This finding would be consistent
with the notion of strong interaction effects in children at the level of word recognition and would suggest that syntactic information can make an important contribution to children's interactive word recognition processes.
The third prediction is that younger readers' use of coherent sentence context
will vary as a function of task requirements (word vs. meaningfulness assessment)
to a greater extent than will that of adults. Specifically, it is predicted that the
difference in the speed of evaluating semantically coherent sentences at the level
of word recognition versus meaningfulness will be greater in children than in adults.
This finding would be consistent with Stanovich's (1980) distinction between two
types of contextual uses (that which affects ongoing word recognition and that
which aids in comprehension) and would suggest that children make relatively
greater use of context to aid word recognition, whereas adults make relatively
greater use of context to aid comprehension.
METHOD
Subjects
Subjects were 24 students from each of the third- (mean age 9-0; range 8-8 to
9-5), sixth- (mean age 12-1; range 11-7 to 12-9), and college-grade levels (mean
age 19-6; range 18-6 to 21-1). The selection of subjects from these grade levels is
consistent with those used by Raduege and Schwantes (1987) and Stanovich et al.
(1985) in their findings of developmental differences in context use to facilitate
word recognition and, thus, affords maximal opportunity at replication and extension of their findings. Moreover, Willows and Ryan (1986) found that grammatical
sensitivity showed substantial growth in grades one through three and speculated
that there was little growth in grammatical sensitivity beyond Grade 5. The grade
levels employed in the present study were selected to provide a direct means of
investigating this possibility. Students participated in the experiment during the
months of February and March. Mean grade equivalent reading comprehension
scores for the children (as measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, administered
in March of the same year) were 3-7 (range 2-3 to 4-8) and 6-6 (range 4-6 to 8-4)
for the third and sixth graders, respectively. The children were recruited from
a predominantly middle-class elementary school in a small primarily residential
community in which some farming is carried on, and the college students were
recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool at a large 4-year mid-
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Journal of Reading Behavior
Table 1
Examples of Sentence Stimuli Used in Each Condition
Condition
Sentence
Semantic Coherent
Semantic-Coherent-nonword
Syntax Intact
Syntax Intact-nonword
Incoherent
Incoherent-nonword
The sky turned dark and it started to rain.
The cherry was on the ger of ice cream.
The tree fixed about two books of funny lights.
Large pigs cry since they wear very warm hambed.
The boy get the climbed cat the tree to.
Very rode steep bike alti hill the she her.
western university. All subjects were volunteers. Parental consent was obtained
prior to participation by the children.
Materials
The materials were two sets of 112 nine-word sentences. Within each set of
sentences, three different sentence types were represented: semantically coherent,
syntactically intact, and incoherent sentences (see Table 1). Semantically coherent
sentences are meaningful and grammatically appropriate sentences. Syntactically
intact sentences are nonmeaningful, but grammatically appropriate sentences.
These sentences were constructed by interchanging across sentences the subject
phrases, verb phrases, and object phrases used in the coherent sentences. An incoherent sentence is formed by randomly rearranging the words in a coherent sentence. All of the words used in the study were pretested and found to be highly
recognizable in written form to third-grade students. In addition, a group of four
second- and third-grade teachers rated the content of each sentence used in the
coherent condition as above average in familiarity to second- and third-grade
students.
Sentences were presented in two types of tasks. In a lexical decision task
subjects were instructed to indicate by pressing a yes-no response button whether
all of the items in the sentence were words. In a semantic decision task subjects
were instructed to indicate by pressing a yes-no response button whether the sentence was meaningful. In each task, subjects saw 88 sentences: 44 semantically
coherent (all words, meaningful sentence), 22 syntactically intact (all words, nonmeaningful sentence), and 22 incoherent (all words, nonmeaningful sentence). An
additional 24 sentences were presented in the lexical decision task, each containing
a single pronounceable non word. Of these non word sentences, 12 followed the
semantically coherent format, 6 followed the syntactically intact format, and 6
followed the incoherent sentence format. In these nonword sentences, one of the
original words of the sentence was replaced with a fourth-order approximation-to-
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
341
English nonword of the same number of letters as the original word. Location of
the nonword in the sentence was randomly determined with the restrictions that the
nonword had to be at least three letters in length and, across the nonword sentences
in each condition, the nonword appeared equally often within each third of the
nine-word sentence (first three-word segment, second three-word segment, and
third three-word segment). Half the subjects within each grade level participated
in the lexical decision task and the remaining subjects participated in the semantic
decision task. Each sentence set was presented to half the subjects within each
task. Test sentences within each set were randomly ordered. No sentence appeared
more than once within the set presented to a given subject.
It is important to note here that reading rates in the semantic decision task, in
which meaningfulness judgments were made for semantically coherent sentences,
were 101-, 165-, and 285-words per minute, respectively for third-, sixth-, and
college-grade level students. These rates are well within the range of normal reading
rates for each grade level (e.g., Rayner, 1986; Taylor, 1965) and suggest that the
nature of the stimuli did not engender strategies which markedly differ from those
used in a more common reading situation.
Apparatus
Each sentence was typed on a single line using lowercase letters, except for
the first letter of the sentence. A slide of each individual sentence was rear-projected
onto a translucent screen. Presentation of a sentence was controlled via a Lafayette
electronic shutter attachment that was positioned over the lens of the projector.
When the experimenter pushed a button, two events occurred together: The shutter
immediately opened allowing the sentence to appear on the screen, and a timer,
accurate to the millisecond, was started. The subject responded by pressing one of
the two buttons mounted on a response box situated on the table in front of the
subject. Pressing either response button stopped the timer. If a correct response
was made, a green light came on providing feedback to the student regarding
response accuracy.
Procedure
Subjects were tested individually in a session that lasted approximately 30
minutes. They were told to look at the screen, read the sentence on the screen
silently to themselves, and indicate a decision about the sentence as quickly and
accurately as possible by pressing the appropriate yes-no button on the response
box. Subjects were told that: (a) their time to make the decision and press the
button were being measured and that they should respond as quickly as possible,
and (b) the accuracy of their response was also being recorded and the green light
would come on whenever the correct button was pushed. During the instructions
six 5 x 8 cards were presented to the subject. Each card contained an illustrative
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Journal of Reading Behavior
nine-word sentence. This was followed by presentation of 12 practice trials on the
screen. Following practice, subjects were presented with either 112 test trials in
the lexical decision task or with 88 trials in the semantic decision task. Two brief
rest periods were provided during the sequence of test trials.
In the lexical decision task subjects were told to decide whether all items in
the sentence were words. They were told that if all of the items in the sentence
were words, " . . . as they are in this sentence" (the experimenter presented an
illustrative card), then press the yes button. It was then pointed out that some of
the sentences, however, might have one item that is not a word (the experimenter
presented an illustrative card and requested that the subject point to the nonword
in the sentence). They were told that if a sentence appeared that had an item that
was not a word, then the no button should be pressed. Four additional illustrative
cards (two requiring a yes response and two requiring a no response) were then
presented, and the subject was asked to show which button should be pressed for
each sentence. The six illustrative sentence cards comprised two sentences from
each sentence type condition (one of the two sentences in each condition contained
a nonword), and it was pointed out that not all the sentences would make sense.
Twelve practice trials were presented on the screen and consisted of a random
ordering of four sentences each from the three sentence conditions (one of the four
sentences in each condition contained a nonword).
In the semantic decision task subjects were told to decide whether the sentence
made sense or whether it did not make sense and was just silly. If the sentence
made sense (the experimenter presented an illustrative card), the yes button was to
be pushed. If the sentence did not make sense (the experimenter presented an
illustrative card), the no button was to be pushed. Four additional illustrative cards
were then presented and the subject was asked to indicate the button to be pressed
for each sentence. The six illustrative sentence cards used in this task comprised
two sentences from each sentence type condition. Twelve practice trials were presented on the screen and consisted of a random ordering of six coherent sentences
and three sentences each from the two remaining sentence conditions.
RESULTS
Trials on which an incorrect response was made were scored as errors. In
addition, trials on which the response time was more than 2.5 standard deviations
above or below the subject's mean for that condition were regarded as unreliable
measures of the subject's typical performance and these responses were also scored
as errors. All reaction-time data from error trials were dropped from the reactiontime analysis. The mean percentage of errors was below 10% in each condition
(see Table 2) and averaging across conditions, the mean percentage of errors for
the third-, sixth-, and college-grade levels was 5.4, 4.2, and 3.1, respectively.
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
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Table 2
Mean Response Times in Milliseconds (standard deviations) and Error
Percentages for Each Grade in the Lexical (Yes Responses Only) and Semantic
Decision Tasks
Grade Level
SEM
Lexical Decision
SYN
INC
SEM
Third
RT
Sixth
Err.
RT
3517
(1155)
2.1
1993
(460)
0.2
1759
(232)
0.2
4007
(1347)
5.3
2163
(530)
1.1
1853
(220)
1.1
4892
(2048)
6.4
2351
(562)
4.2
2075
(296)
3.8
5335
(1459)
3.5
3272
(1046)
5.9
1898
(348)
2.7
Err.
College RT
Err.
Semantic Decision
SYN
INC
5585
(1618)
7.2
3363
(1372)
7.6
1895
(357)
7.2
5827
(1996)
3.0
3481
(1966)
6.4
1779
(381)
3.8
Note. SEM = semantic coherent condition; SYN = syntactic intact condition; INC = incoherent condition.
None of the major differences in the reaction-time data is obscured by speedaccuracy tradeoffs.
Mean reaction times for each condition are also presented in Table 2. It should
be noted that the hypothesis of homogeneity of variance for between-group cells
in the overall data set was rejected (F max text, p<.05). However, the ratio of
extreme variances for the between-group cells was not large and with equal sample
sizes, the F distribution probabilities have been shown to be quite robust with
respect to much greater degrees of heterogeneity of variance (Lindquist, 1953).
Consistent with this notion, a reduction in the degrees of freedom used to judge
the statistical significance levels as suggested by Box (cited in Winer, 1971) yielded
a pattern of significant outcomes identical to those obtained without this correction
factor and the latter statistical outcomes are reported here. In addition, analyses on
the median reaction time data yielded a pattern of significance level outcomes
identical to the analyses on the mean reaction-time data. The mean reaction-time
data were analyzed in accordance with each of the three specific a priori predictions
that motivated the study.
The first prediction was that younger readers as compared to adults would
show greater differences in lexical decision latencies when evaluating semantically
coherent sentences for words (i.e., sentences that contain both semantic and syntactic information) versus evaluating syntactically intact sentences for words (i.e.,
sentences that contain syntactic information only). This involved comparing performance in the lexical decision task between the semantically coherent and syntactically intact conditions. Mean reaction times for each subject in each condition were
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Journal of Reading Behavior
used in a 2(semantically coherent vs. syntactically intact) x 3(grade) x 2(list)
mixed analysis of variance with sentence type as a within-subjects factor and grade
and list as between-subjects factors. This analysis indicated significant main effects
of sentence type, F(l, 30) = 45.59, p<.01, and grade, F(2, 30) = 20.18, p < . 0 1 ,
as well as a significant interaction of sentence type x grade, F(2, 30) = 10.60,
p < . 0 1 . As shown in Table 2 for the lexical decision times, all grade levels responded faster for semantically coherent as compared to syntactically intact sentences, and the pattern of mean differences and the significant interaction indicated
that this difference was greatest for the third graders and decreased with increased
grade level. This difference in response times between the semantically coherent
and syntactically intact sentences was significant for third graders, F(l, 11) =
19.96, p<.0l. This same pattern of differences between grades is observed when
the absolute increase in speed for semantically coherent sentences is expressed as
a proportion of the decision time for syntactically intact sentences. Thus, for students within each grade level word recognition speed is faster when the word
appears in semantically coherent as compared to syntactically intact but nonmeaningful sentences. The degree to which word recognition is speeded by the added
presence of semantic information is significantly greater for third graders as compared to college students.
The second prediction was that younger readers, compared to adults, would
show greater differences in lexical decision latencies when evaluating syntactically
intact sentences for words (i.e., sentences that contain syntactic information only)
versus evaluating incoherent sentences for words (i.e., sentences that contain negligible syntactic information). This involved examining differences in the lexical
decision task between the syntactically intact and incoherent conditions. Mean
reaction times for each subject in each condition were used in a 2(syntactically
intact vs. incoherent) X 3(grade) x 2(list) mixed analysis of variance. This analysis indicated significant main effects of sentence type, F(l, 30) = 27.19, p < . 0 1 ,
and grade, F(2, 30)= 18.92, p < . 0 1 , as well as a significant interaction of sentence
type x grade, F(2, 30) = 7.51, p<.0l. As shown in Table 2 for lexical decision
times, all grade levels responded faster for syntactically intact as compared to
incoherent sentences, and the pattern of mean differences and the significant interaction indicate that the magnitude of this difference was greatest for the third
graders. This difference in response times between syntactically intact and incoherent sentences was significant for third graders, F(l, 11) = 14.77, p<.0l. Again,
the same pattern of differences is observed when the absolute increase in speed for
syntactically intact sentences is expressed as a proportion of the decision time for
incoherent sentences. Thus, for students within each grade level, word recognition
is faster when the word appears in syntactically intact (but nonmeaningful) sentences as compared to ungrammatical and nonmeaningful sentences. This added effect
of the presence of syntactic information on word recognition speed is significantly
greater for third graders as compared to college students.
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
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The third prediction was that younger readers as compared to adults would
show greater differences in making word/nonword evaluations versus meaningful/
nonmeaningful evaluations. This involved examining differences between the lexical and the semantic decision tasks. Mean reaction times for each subject in each
task were used in a 2(lexical vs. semantic) X 3(grade) x 2(list) between-subjects
analysis of variance. This analysis indicated significant main effects of task, F(l,
60) = 24.05, p < . 0 1 , and grade, F(2, 60) = 48.71, p<.0\, as well as a significant
interaction of task X grade, F(2, 60) = 5.06, p<.0l. As shown in Table 2 for
semantically coherent sentences, all grade levels responded faster in making lexical
as compared to semantic decisions and the pattern of mean differences and the
significant interaction indicate that the magnitude of this difference was greatest
for the third graders. This difference in response times between lexical and semantic
decisions for semantically coherent sentences was significant for third graders, F(l,
22)= 11.45, p<.0l. Again, it should be noted that the same pattern of differences
in this comparison is obtained when the absolute increase in speed in the lexical
decision task is expressed as a proportion of the semantic decision time. Thus, for
third graders the decision that all nine items of a sentence were words was made
significantly faster than the decision that a nine-word sentence was meaningful.
However, the difference in the times required to make these two types of decisions
(lexical and sentence meaningfulness) was much smaller for adults.
DISCUSSION
The present study investigated the degree to which children and adult readers
use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. The impact of
contextual information on the assessment of word recognition was investigated
through use of a lexical decision task. The impact of contextual information on the
assessment of sentence meaningfulness was investigated through use of a semantic
decision task. Three major sets of findings were obtained.
The first finding relates to comparisons involving students' use of complete
(semantic and syntactic) contextual information versus their use of partial (syntactic) contextual information to speed word recognition. As expected, the facilitation
of word recognition speed provided by the combination of semantic and syntactic
informational sources was much greater than the facilitation provided by syntactic
information only. This result extends findings of prior studies of developmental
differences in use of sentence context to facilitate recognition of target words (e.g.,
Schwantes 1982; West & Stanovich, 1978). In previous work, context effects were
assessed by measuring the speed to recognize single target words that were typically
presented on an isolated frame apart from prior context. In contrast, the present
study employed the procedure of presenting entire sentence information simulta-
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Journal of Reading Behavior
neously. This procedure provided a means for examining use of context during online processing of words embedded within complete sentences and, thus, allows
for subjects to use both cascaded and parafoveal processing of sentence information. Under these conditions, children exhibited significantly greater use of contextual-semantic information to speed word recognition as compared to adults. The
finding that children rely more heavily on semantic information than do adults to
facilitate word recognition during on-line sentence processing is difficult to account
for in terms of a bottom-up processing explanation. The developmental trend appears to be characterized by heavy use of contextual semantic information by young
readers to speed word level analyses and decreased reliance upon context for aiding
analyses at the word level with increased age.
The second finding indicated that students, and particularly younger readers,
can and do make use of syntactic information to facilitate word recognition speed
in a lexical decision task. This finding has three specific implications. First, this
result replicates recent findings with adults indicating a sensitivity to the constraints
provided by syntactic information (independent of semantic information) in order
to speed word recognition during sentence processing (e.g., Sanocki, Goldman,
Waltz, Cook, Epstein, & Oden, 1985; West & Stanovich, 1986). Second, this
finding indicates that children's word recognition speed, like that of adults, is also
affected by the presence versus absence of syntactic information. Third, these
results indicate that young readers can and do rely upon even rather general syntactic constraints to facilitate word recognition, that is, even though specific words in
the syntactically coherent sentences were not at all highly predictable in their
sequence, third-grade readers showed significantly greater facilitation in their lexical decisions about these words (relative to words in the incoherent sentences) than
did adults.
This developmental difference in use of syntactic information to speed word
recognition is somewhat difficult to account for in terms of the interactive compensatory reading model. Within that model, developmental differences in context use
for speeding word recognition are usually attributed to children's slower word
recognition speed and their consequent greater reliance upon what is assumed to
be a rather narrowly focused attentional expectancy process (Stanovich et al.,
1985). It is assumed that this restricted expectancy process focuses attention upon
and, thus, facilitates recognition of only those potential items whose predictability
level is reasonably high given both prior knowledge and prior sentence information.
However, it is unlikely that the information provided in the low constraint syntax
intact condition (e.g., "He took wood to drink because he was sleeping") serves
as an adequate basis for generating specific expectancies with a high degree of
accuracy. It is not clear whether the observed syntactic effects reflect a direct
interaction of syntactic processing with the lexical output thereby enabling faster
word analysis in the syntactically intact condition, or whether violation of grammatical appropriateness in the incoherent sentence condition produces interference in
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Children's Word Recognition and Meaning Extraction
processing syntactically inappropriate words. It is clear, however, that the presence
of syntactic information affects word recognition speed both in adult readers and
in younger children. It is interesting to note that Willows and Ryan (1986) suggested that grammatical sensitivity may show substantial growth in the early elementary school years, with relatively less development beyond grade five. The
findings of Simons and Leu (1987) together with the present findings indicate that
grade-school children are indeed quite sensitive to the syntactic constraints of context. Consistent with this suggestion, the degree of difference in use of syntactic
information at the level of word assessment was in fact much greater between third
and sixth graders than between sixth graders and college students.
The third finding indicated that third- and sixth-grade students, in contrast to
adults, made much faster decisions in identifying all words of a semantically coherent nine-word sentence as words than in identifying a semantically coherent nineword sentence as meaningful. The developmental difference obtained in this comparison suggests that the interaction of information from the lexical word
recognition level and message meaningfulness level may have a different relationship in children than in adults. In children, the impact of semantic and syntactic
information appears to be greater on individual word assessment and recognition
as compared to sentence meaning; while in adults, the gathering of overall sentence
meaning may function more simultaneously with automatic word recognition processes (Forster, 1979).
The first two findings discussed above suggest that children make heavy use
of available semantic and syntactic information to increase word recognition speed.
At the same time, the third finding indicates that the overall meaning of a sentence
becomes available to children significantly more slowly than does the overall lexical
information for the words comprising the sentence. Taken together, these results
may be interpreted as suggesting that information accumulating in semantic and
syntactic processors affects children's reading more directly at the level of individual word analysis than at the level of meaning integration. On the other hand,
information accumulating in semantic and syntactic processors seems to have a less
marked effect on adults' word recognition speed. In contrast to children, the rate
with which the overall meaning of a sentence becomes available to adults does not
markedly differ from the time required to recognize the words comprising the
sentence. This suggests that use of semantic and syntactic information by adult
readers may be directed more towards derivation of larger units of meaning rather
than towards word recognition. Consistent with the notion that adults may be more
sensitive during reading to overall sentence meaning as compared to children is the
observation that the mean response times to decide on the meaningfulness of a
sentence in the syntactically intact and incoherent sentence conditions were among
the fastest decisions made by adults but were among the slowest decisions made
by third graders (see Table 2). Adults made these semantic decisions (based on an
observed lack of meaningfulness) for syntactically intact and incoherent sentences
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347
348
Journal of Reading Behavior
at rates similar to their lexical decision rates, whereas children's semantic decision
times in these conditions were markedly slower than their corresponding lexical
decision times in these conditions.
Some caution in interpreting and/or generalizing the present set of findings
needs to be exercised. First, it should be recognized that there is some debate
regarding the degree to which the lexical decision task can be claimed to isolate
word recognition processing and decoding. Seidenberg, Waters, Sanders, and
Langer (1984) have shown that performance in the lexical decision task may be
affected not only by lexical recognition processes but by post-lexical processes as
well. In the present study, it was assumed that analyses at the word level are
implicated more selectively in the lexical decision task than they are during the
semantic decision task and, thus, questions concerning the differential effects of
context and sentence coherence on word level analysis versus sentence meaningfulness can be addressed within the present paradigm. Given the above caveat, the
present set of findings are suggestive of age differences in the impact of context
upon word level analyses versus sentence comprehension. Another cautionary note
which should be recognized concerns the use of the same level-of-difficulty stimuli
(third-grade appropriate level stimuli) for each age group participating in the study.
The methodological advantages in maintaining exact control over the stimuli presented to each grade level are, in part, offset by the possible confound resulting
from use of stimuli which have a decreased level of difficulty with increased
age. Although the key findings within each analysis involved comparisons of the
magnitude of differences between sentence types within age groups, the generalizability of the findings is nevertheless limited by the nature of the stimuli employed.
In addition, the stimuli presented in the study consisted of a series of unrelated
sentences, rather than a cohesive and coherent story text. The semantic decisions
about meaningfulness covered a very limited range of information, that is, the
demands on the readers' comprehension-memory capacity were relatively minimal.
Consequently, the generality of this set of findings to more natural and elaborate
text material needs to be established in future research.
In summary, the data for the children suggest that, during reading, the attention
of young readers may be focused primarily on the process of using and integrating
contextual information in order to perform word level analyses and recognition.
Thus, for middle-elementary school aged readers, strongest interaction effects
among different levels of information accumulating during reading may typically
occur at the level of individual word analysis. The findings indicate that the richness
of the context, including the level of syntactic as well as semantic familiarity, has
an impact on the speed with which children's word recognition processes occur.
The data for adults suggest that, during reading, attention may be focused primarily
on the process of using and integrating different levels of information to analyze
meaning and coherency of larger units of text. For fluent reading adults, the strongest interaction effects may typically occur during the evaluative and regulative
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349
processes directed toward assessing understanding of the text. Thus, the conceptualization of reading as incorporating some aspect of a psycholinguistic guessing game
may have some merit for younger readers at the level of word analysis, as has been
suggested by Schwantes, Boesl, and Ritz (1980), and at the level of more general
meaning extraction for adults, as has been articulated by Goodman (1976).
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