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The ability to learn new word meanings from context by school-age children with and without language comprehension difficulties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2003

KATE CAIN ,
JANE V. OAKHILL  and
CARSTEN ELBRO
KATE CAIN
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
JANE V. OAKHILL
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
CARSTEN ELBRO
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
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Abstract

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups: children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , August 2003 , pp. 681 - 694
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The work reported in this paper was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council grant (R000 23 5438) awarded to Jane Oakhill and Peter Bryant and a new Lecturer Grant from the University of Nottingham awarded to Kate Cain. We would like to thank Lisa Butterworth, Kate Lemmon and Sarah McCallum for their assistance with group selection and scoring. Finally, we thank the staff and pupils of the schools in East Sussex and Nottingham who participated in this work.