The Effects of Context on Word Identification in Good and Poor Readers

A semantic priming procedure was used to test the hypothesis that children differing in word-decoding skills differentially used context to facilitate word identification. Fifth-grade Ss classified as good or poor readers (N = 14 each group) saw pairs of stimuli - a prime followed by a target - with instructions to read the target as rapidly as possible. Primes were either semantically related or unrelated to the targets. For both single-word & incomplete-sentence primes, targets in related pairs were read faster than those in unrelated pairs, with larger facilitation effects obtained with the incomplete-sentence primes. However, the magnitude of these context effects did not vary as a function of word-decoding skill. In contrast to data obtained by other procedures, these findings suggest that differences between good & poor readers in word-decoding skills are not necessarily related to differences in ability to extract & utilize the semantic content of written material. 2 Tables. HA